Advice

My advice for Essential Computer Skills would be come to class, don't skip it! Its hard to make things up if you miss them because there is a lot of information learned in every class, so you have to make sure you pay attention.

student websites

When we looked at everyone's websites in class, my favorites were Teka's, Katie, and Rory's. I liked Teka's because the design was really, really cool and it looked professionally done. I liked Katie's because it really matched her personality and I think she successfully made a website that completely represented her. And finally, I liked Rory's because it was really well designed and had a lot of funny elements and was entertaining to look at.

My website

Please visit my website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~zlunden. Before we learned how to make our websites, I was dreading it, but then we actually learned how to do everything, and it was easier than I thought it would be. I used Expression Web, which made things so easy and simple. I am most proud of my Gamma Chi Delta page because I like how the tables look with the writing and I think it looks really balanced. I had a little bit of difficulty with my navigation bar, so if there was anything i'd change, it would be that because it doesn't look as good as I hoped it would. My biggest technical challenge was inserting my navigation bar because it came onto the page being way too big and I had to resize it every time but it caused a bunch of spacing problems. My biggest design challenge was probably finding the right color for my font because it seemed like everything was hard to see. I plan on showing my sight to probably my friends and maybe my family. I do not really what class I would need to make a website for in the future, but if it comes up, i'll know what to do now!

HTML code

I think it is important to be able to know html code even with all the fancy technology that does it for you because you never know when that technology is going to break of malfunction and its very good to be able to manually do something. Also, it is good to know the basics of something you are doing.

Pictures That Lie

My picture that lies is this picture of a cat with a human smile. I chose this picture because it seemed like a funny thing to do. The picture is just this picture of a cat that I found on Google and then a picture of a smile I also found on Google. I manipulated it by cutting out the picture of the smile and adding it to the cats face, taking out the color so it was grey and matched the cats coloring, and then blurred the edges so it looked more blended. The manipulation was not harmful because most people will realize that its not really the cat's smile, so they won't feel lied to. This relates to the article I researched because the article is talking about all the different things you can do with photoshop, especially related to artists and all the crazy things they can do now. For example, the article says "Digital photo manipulation is a new applied art that has transformed relationships among art directors, agencies, photographers, production specialists, and printers." The article I read is:

The Altered Image, Computer Artist; Oct/Nov95, Vol. 4 Issue 6, p36.

Powerpoint Presentations

Last week everyone in the class did a presentation about what our inteded jobs were and what we found most interesting about those jobs. My two favorites were Tika Nichola's on the Terracota Warriors and Alexa Soto's on Genocide. Both powerpoints had really awesome effects and were really engaging. The animation on the title page of Alexa's of the blood was really good and got the point accross of what she was trying to say. The animation that Tika did that changed the colors of a picture she found on the internet was really cool, especially because it was something we never learned so she must have really good photoshop skills.

Powerpoint Presentations

In class we have been learning about how to make powerpoint presentations that are interesting and entertaining. I can remember when I first learned how to use powerpoint when I was in 5th grade, and all the slides just consisted of all the words we were going to say and pictures from clipart. I realize now that those presentations must have been really really boring, and after reading the articles, I see that I basically did everything like absolutely wrong. I think the main thing that all the articles talk about is not putting everything you are going to say onto your powerpoint. Id someone is just reading straight off the screen, everyone will be bored and not pay attention to what you have to say. That is probably the thing I find most annoying about powerpoint presentations. It is important to use other elements like sound and visuals such as interesting pictures and clips that have cool effects and have as little words as possible on the screen so you can say your presentation and sound more natural.

This is my collage I made using photoshop. It is a picture of my best friend Ella and she's deciding whether she wants to be happy or sad for the day.

Chris Nolan

Last Tuesday Chris Nolan, who works in the Trinity library, came to class and gave us an lecture about using search engines such as Google and Bing. He asked the class what search engine everyone used, and when almost everyone said Google, he showed us a bar graph that said that something like 70% of people on the internet use Google, followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Ask, and AOL. He focused the rest of the lecture mostly on Google, which was understandable given what we had just learned. There are so many things about Google that I didn't know before this lecture, like how to modify your search to narrow down what resources come up, that the first links that come up are ordered by relevance, but the most interesting thing I found out was what that the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button is what you press so Google takes you directly to the link that would be first if you had just clicked the "Search" button. I thought this was so interesting because I use Google a lot and I had always seen that, but I didn't know what it meant until last Tuesday.

Pictures That Lie

For this assignment, I chose the picture of Katie Couric taken on her first night as an anchor for CBS news. I chose this picture because it is an example of how the media can take an image of a celebrity and change it to make them look perfect, when in actuality they are just normal human beings. The not-doctored picture of Katie originated by CBS and released in May of her first year, but the slimmed-down picture appeared in the September issue of Watch Magazine, a publication owned by CBS. The picture was manipulated to make Katie's figure more slim, her dress darker and more flattering, and her skin tone was given a more pink hue. I think the picture was manipulated to make Katie appear more "attractive". This manipulation is completely harmful because its a lie to the viewers and makes people think that what they normally look like is not okay. It gives the perception that famous people have no flaws, but it is not true.

CLT

Last Thursday in class we went and visited the AT&T Center for Learning and Technology, or CLT for short. CLT is located on the first floor of the Coates Library, and when we walked down the stairs and saw everything, I was shocked because I had no idea that it was even there before. There are tons of resources available at CLT. There are studios, which consist of high-end Windows and Macintosh work stations that each include color and black-and-white laser scanners, audio and video digitalizing capabilities and other multimedia software. There is also a Digital Audio Lab, Media Presentation Lab, Video Conference Center, and Innovation Studio. CLT is useful for many things, such as if you just need a computer to use, or you have more advanced technology assignments that include a lot of video and audio requirements. It will be useful for this class in that if I ever have questions, I can go down there and find someone to help me out.

COPYRIGHT

During last class, Josh Hardin from the library came and gave us a presentation about copyrighting and its history and why it is used. Copyrighting got started in 1790, the year the constitution was ratified, predating the Bill of Rights-showing its importance to our country. It was important because the whole issue came down to money, and if something you do is not copyrighted, then anyone else can take it and use it as their own, and possibly make money over it. The terms for copyright are its the authors birthday plus 70 years. The law used to be the authors birthday plus 50 years, but that was changed when the death of Walt Disney came around, and the company feared losing their copyright on all the characters and stories he had created, so they petitioned the government to change the law and won. We also learned some scary aspects of copyright, like the federal government defines copyright as making at least 10 copies of something at a value of $2,500, and also that everything someone does on the Internet is track able back to them. On college campuses, there are hundreds of students every day that receive notices regarding copyright infringement from things such as file sharing.

COPYRIGHT by Zia Lunden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

This is a picture of the Network Diagram I created to show the Trinity University Networking System. Last Tuesday in class we took a tour of the server room, and Jared Pack, the Systems Administrator, showed us how the campus is wired. After the tour, our assignment was to create a diagram explaining everything that we learned. I was scared at first because I wasn't sure if I would remember how to use all of the tools, but in the end I think it turned out pretty well and I had fun making the design for the diagram and seeing the final product.

Top Tech Tip

In the last class we had a presentation by Joe Hatch, who is basically the creator of the Winn 104 Tech Center from what I understood. He talked to us about computers in general and a lot of programs, but the thing that really stuck with me was when he was talking about viruses that you can catch because I really didn't know very much about them. He said you have to make sure you update your virus protection software whenever it requires an update because if you have an old version, you can catch one of the new viruses that are made every day. This freaked me out a little bit because I really didn't know the extent of new viruses that are created and how easy it is to catch one, so from now on I will definitely keep my software up to date!

Scavenger Hunt

So in class last Tuesday, our homework was to fill out this Scavenger Hunt worksheet that had "secret facts" from everyone in the class, so we had to match each person to their secret fact that we found by reading the posts they made on their blogs. It took a little while to read through everyone's information, but I really enjoyed looking at the blogs everyone created and learning stuff about them, so all in all it was a pretty fun assignment. We also had to comment on two people's posts, and I chose to comment on Katie Duffy's blog http://www.katayduffay.blogspot.com/ and Glenn Etienne's http://getienne.blogspot.com/.

About Me

Hello my name is Zia Lunden and I am from Tucson, AZ. Please feel free to email me here. I attend Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas and I plan on going into the counseling/social work field when I graduate. My favorite thing to do in Tucson is to go hiking because there are so many mountains around, but now that I am in Texas, I basically just like to hang out with my friends and go to movies and stuff like that. I love Trinity and everyone I have met here, like my roommate, who has to put up with my OCD habits and my need to keep the room very, very clean. I am excited about taking this computer class because in all honesty, I know basically nothing about computers or all the things that you can do with them, so I am hoping this class improves my technology skills.