Hint for future students...

This class is a lot of fun overall.  As long as you go to class and pay attention then everything is a breeze.  Although there is homework almost every night it never takes more than 30 minutes.  And it just gets more interesting as the semester rolls on!

Favorite Websites

I would have to say my favorite website is Leslie's.  Yet again she proves how awesome she is at designing things.  It has great colors and pictures.  And the background is very nice and simplistic.  But the best part is that everything matches very well and combines together to make the whole page look awesome.  I also liked Lisa's.  It was cool how every page had the same background because it made all the pages flow very well when I was searching through them.  Hers and Leslie's are very unique from eachother but they are both still great and a lot of fun to go though, even when you've already seen everything.

MY WEBSITE!!

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~hhopson
Because I put a lot of hard work in it and I think it is kind of cool.
I did most of my work on my Mac laptop so I had to use Kompozer for about 90% of the time.  Although I thought Expression Web was a better editor, Kompozer still got the job done, but it did make it a little bit more complicated.  Creating the website was easier to actually create than I thought, but designing and setting everything up so that it looks good was a lot harder and more strenuous than I thought it would be.  I think I like my Friends & Family page the most.  It was the first one I created.  I think it is simple enough where your eyes don't get tired from scanning over a bunch of different things, yet it says a lot.  The few words on the page keep the reader drawn in because he wants to see what each little segment of the page will say.  I would have liked to make a better background for each page though.  I searched online for good backgrounds but I wasn't able to find one that was cool and matched my web page but didn't distract the reader at the same time.  The hardest technical challenge was probably setting up the tables for my picture.  I kept finding a way to mess everything up somehow.  The biggest design challenge was making everything (words, pictures, shapes) match eachother at least a little bit.  I can't wait to show this to my family.  I hope I get to create another website for a class in the future because I thought it was very fun overall.

Larry Hechler

One of the things Larry talked about most that affected my decisions about computer in the future was his continual admiration of Dell computers.  Not necessarily because of the hardware or software, but because of the protection/warranty plan that can be purchased with a Dell computer.  As soon as anything messes up on your Dell laptop, it can be sent in and fixed free of charge.  Even if the computer is completely smashed, Dell will replace the whole computer free of charge.  This seems a little crazy if you ask me; almost like Dell knows their computers will mess up a lot but Larry did not say anything about this so I can't jump to conclusions since I own a Mac.  He said he liked Macs to but he would choose a Dell laptop because of the protection plan.  This will help me choose a laptop in the future.  Although I love Mac computers, they are expensive and their protection/warranty plan does not cover near as much as the Dell plan.  As a college kid trying to save money, this could save a few hundred dollars at least.

Polar Bearcat

I decided to combine a picture of a polar bear and a cat.  They were similar in color and I thought it would be fun since I hadn't seen one online.  I took the head off of the polar bear and placed it on the cat's body to create a polar bearcat.  But don't worry, no animals were harmed in the making of this photo and I won't try this in real life.  This was just for fun and I don't think anyone would take this seriously as a new type of animal.  It was actually a lot harder to make the head match the body than I thought it would be. I matched the colors but the difference in hair was still visible.  But after using the burn tool and the dodge tool and smudging the pictures a tiny bit, I made them match well enough.  Although some people are creating new images with Photoshop and using them in their studies.  I read a few articles that documented people using Photoshop to alter their photos for studies, and that schools are about to really crack down on this.  I think image manipulation is very fun, but that it should never be used as anything beyond that.  Sure someone can adjust an image to make it better for their family or a friend but it shouldn't be used ac academic research.  This is cheating, you just have to put more effort into it.  Anyone that is caught should be punished the same as if they had been cheating on a test.  If you want to read about some of the cases where people have been caught using an image that has been manipulated, here is the citation for one of the articles that I read.

Parrish, Debra, and Bridget Noonan. "Image Manipulation as Research Misconduct." Science & Engineering Ethics 15.2 (2009): 161-167. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 11 Nov. 2010.

PowerPoint Prowess

We had some great PowerPoint presentations on Tuesday and Thursday.  There were some great topics that were very interesting and some that I have never even heard about.


My subject was on a branch of Geology called Seismology.  This was the study of the seismic waves traveling through and around the earth.  This is used to predict future earthquakes.  While researching this topic I learned some very interesting information about Jim Berkland, who is a very successful seismologist that has even predicted some major earthquakes.  With some more studying and some better technology, we might be able to predict most of the earthquakes in the world very precisely.  Many lives could be saved in the future.


The PowerPoint that impressed me the most was Leslie's.  She did an awesome job on designing her background and used some exciting graphics that had some very cool colors that drew in the reader.  Her topic was also interesting and precise.


I also liked Douglas's.  Although the design on his slides could have been a little better, I thought his topic was very interesting.  It was definitely something new to me.

Chris Nolan

Thursday Chris Nolan came in to give us the 4-1-1 on search engine sites such as google.  He presented many helpful tips for finding that "perfect site" for the 5 page essay due tomorrow morning.  Something that really helped me personally was learning how to narrow down the sites that were shown in the search to academic ones that contain scholar level information.  This will really help me in the future.  What surprised me about google was the ability to search for information within a certain country.  I would have never thought about doing something like that.  I give Chris a thumbs up for very helpful information.