The Best Websites in the Known Universe.

Green is one of my favorite colors along with Red. That may seem like I'm going to talk about Christmas, but Christmas isn't the topic though it is awesome. The topic is the Best Websites in the Known Universe and the first I'm going to address is Jenny Zeberlein's because it's well organized, fun to look, and the page has a lot of green and it concerns Ireland.

With traveling in mind, I have to say that I enjoyed Taylor's site with all the information and journal he posted from his journey to Britain. Had he not put that there, I would never have known that he'd gone across the pond. I'm not sure if he took some of the trippy photos while he was there or not, but the work he did editing photos is pretty cool.

Finally, Katie's site tells an interesting story that captured my heart and made me want to listen to Kitsch once their fearless leader is back from Japanland. Having put up their lyrics and soon-to-be discography, I can't wait to see more on the band's progress should she put more.

If you'd like to visit my site, which doesn't quite compare to those I've listed, click the spell below:

Accio His Erratik Majesti's Website

Carmel's Cupcake Endeavor For Kids Who Can't Cook Good

I favored my dear colleague's presentation on Tuesday because I hate pink but it made me want cupcakes and she spoke well about something she was actually passionate about. Many of my close friends have been into cooking and though I've never really gotten into it, I can see how it's easy to be passionate about it.

Onto topic #2... This picture I revamped:



I had actually done it a while back, but with the help of Adobe Photoshop I made it look a little better.

I hope you all enjoy it ey.
Au revoir.
- Adain

My Two Favorite Blogs Thus Far

I thoroughly enjoyed Katie's presentation on the history of being a DJ because the music business is fascinating to me and the history is interesting as well. My second favorite had to be Taylor's presentation on Chinese, since I'm actually taking it with him and everything he said made sense to me despite how I was starving towards the end of class. Basically, since it stuck with me even though I was hungry, it was really interesting. When I'm hungry, I'm usually as attentive as a termite.

Anyway, I'm going to see what presentations there'll be today and pick two from there, and then they all enter a coliseum for battle royale to see who gave the best presentation. My money might be on Taylor. Stay tuned.
- Adain

5 Important Guidelines for Using PowerPoint

I'm going to open this blog with Seth Godin's words.

"The point of PowerPoint is to communicate with your audience."

On this note, it's important to consider that if you were really just giving the audience a surplus of facts on whatever you're talking about, you should've just printed out a report for them. Depending on the topic, this could be more appropriate but consider it's a presentation that you're using Powerpoint to make. So,

Guideline #1 : Put a bit of yourself into the slides so you can better present yourself and your topic.

When you put yourself into the presentation, it's easier to hold the attention of your audience because they'll sense your genuity if you do so. Presentations are about trust because they are hardly ever about just the facts. Presentations consist of a number of ideas that you're trying to sell to the audience. If you want them to read it for themselves, they can, but after the presentation.

Guideline #2: If you want the audience to pay attention, type out everything you're going to explain, and give them a copy of that after the presentation.

Think about it. Would you pay attention to someone talking in front of a room if they gave you a hard copy of everything they were going to say beforehand? No. You'd be reading. I know I'd be reading if they were either a) talking about something I didn't care for or b) I didn't like their voice or their face. That could just as easily happen to me if I was giving a presentation,

so I wouldn't give a hard copy beforehand because if you want someone to listen to what you're saying, they have to first like how you hold their attention.

On the note of holding attention is the third guideline:

Guideline #3: Don't type everything you're saying on the slide. It's not a teleprompter.

I like these two examples from the Garr Reynolds webpage :

The one to the right is the good example, and the one to the left is even better. Something simple like that will not only stick with the audience, but it'll be easier for you to remember as well or see out of your peripheral vision in case, whatever cue cards you have are mixed up.

The last two guidelines I have are about showing that you know what's going on.

Guideline #4 : Know when to use what types of charts.

Knowing what kind of chart to use will help all kinds of learners, be they visual or auditory because explaining the visual graphs is easiest when everyone knows why they're being used.

The Garr Reynolds website explained it very well:

Pie Charts

Used to show percentages. Limit the slices to 4-6 and contrast the most important slice either with color or by exploding the slice.
Vertical Bar Charts

Used to show changes in quantity over time. Best if you limit the bars to 4-8
Horizontal Bar Charts

Used to compare quantities. For example, comparing sales figures among the four regions of the company.
Line Charts

Used to demonstrate trends. For example, here is a simple line chart showing that our sales have gone up every year. The trend is good. The arrow comes in later to underscore the point: Our future looks good!

Guideline # 5 : Use the master slide view or slide sorter to go over your presentation beforehand.

If you go over your slide and know what part comes after what in your presentation, people will likely be more attentive due to the coherency or flow of the presentation from one topic to another. Having cue cards with both information and transitions is the last thing I recommend for using Powerpoint. What you say to the audience will click with whatever it is you're showing them in your presentation.

Au revoir.

- Adain

MS Excel

So by far the most interesting thing I've learned to do with Excel is the Special paste technique. It seriously blows my mind to Narnia and back when the data changes as soon as the original source is changed in someway. Once you've copied a graph or a chart, you look under the Home tab, click the arrow under Paste, and click 'Paste Special' and pick the option to paste it as a link in a Powerpoint presentation.

So, no matter where you place it, as long as you have the source there, you can alter it. This would come in handy if say you were giving a presentation that involved charts and someone asks you at the end how a change in the data would affect the numbers. If you have both the Excel file and the Powerpoint presentation on a pen drive, you could load the Excel with the PowerPoint still open, change the data the question is referring to, and talk about what differences there may be.

I have laid awake many a night wondering how the scientists of Microsoft dreamed of making such things or if they even dreamed it all. Or if they're just machines.

If you'd like to see more of my views and work, I've got another blog hurr :
http://erratikinertia.blogspot.com/

Enjoy. Thanks for reading.
- Adain

In case anyone's interested,

My other blog's got more stuff :
http://erratikinertia.blogspot.com/

CLT : ProTools

I had visited CLT before with a friend who showed me how to record music using the lab that we were shown in the 2nd part of our tour. I learned that they actually have a studio-quality USB microphone available for recording.

I'm not sure if I have any ideas using the recording for anything in this class aside from the podcasts which we might do. However, when we were there and our tour guide Rob Chapman was explaining how the technology we have is beyond anything that students will use it for, I got to thinking about how ProTools and microphones could be used to start a club or group that makes professional recordings of for example, the school symphonies or concerts to have on record. It's just an idea but if it went along well enough, perhaps there could even be a branch of Technology, A/V majors or minors that are taught by people to make professional videos, recordings and whatnot.

Nowadays, pretty much anyone can have a great recording with a MacBook and a good microphone, but with the resources to that and more, there should be some sort of club or class for people more interested in learning about technology along with the liberal arts education offered by Trinity.

The Trotsky Image

My image of choice comes from Hany Farid of Dartmouth College who posted two pictures of Leon Trotsky where he appeared with other Russian officials and the very same picture where he was erased after having led a failed struggle against the rise of Joseph Stalin in the 1920s.

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1026_3-6033210-14.html?tag=mncol

The before and after photographs show how he was not only taken out of the photos but how a background was painted in his place as though no one was ever there. However, though they tried to edit him out and help themselves, they ended up helping him, and the effect of the editing was harmful to them. The erasing of Trotsky in this image is significant because though the Communist party tried to erase him from memory entirely, their efforts indicated that they truly feared the ideas he stood for. By taking him out of pictures with them, trying to eradicate any proof that he was in league with them at some point, the Communist Leaders proved their disregard for his ideas but more importantly how they considered his ideas a threat to their ideals of totalitarianism.

Christopher Nolan's Epic Guide to Search Engines

There are a lot of things that I learned how to do today and it's hard to tell where to start so I'll just list my favorite things...

My favorite thing among what he explained was that typing " :site" at the end of whatever you're searching will limit the search to websites whereas if you typed, " :org" or " :gov" it'd be limited to the organization or government webpages. This would actually make it pretty easy to find legitimate information. The other thing that goes hand in hand with this is Google Scholar.



Google Scholar's even easier to use because after typing what you're looking up in the Google searchbar, you go to more - Google Scholar. With some of the journals that come up, you may have to be registered with the website to see the journal or scholarly article but nonetheless it's a legimate way to search for scholarly articles on Google.

The two more interesting functions that I saw on the chart here:

http://trinity.edu/cnolan/advanced_google.pdf

are the weather and flight status searches. By just typing in, "southwest 654" you can actually check the status of a flight using google. By typing, "Weather: 78212" you can get the weather reports for the zip code you entered.



The guide was definitely my favorite part and I'm saving it among my favorite links because it's got a lot of useful information.



Au revoir.

Copyright Laws: Fair Use

In class on Tuesday, Jason Hardin presented the class with information about Copyright Laws and Infringement, a lot of which I had only vague ideas about. To begin with, I didn't know it dated all the way back to 1790 or that Fair Use was the only means of defense a citizen had against Copyright Laws. We learned that Fair Use consisted of four factors of a situation that are considered in cases of Copyright Infringment; these are the amount of work copied, the motive for copying, the effect the copying has on the Rights holder, and the nature of the work being copied.

While there was a great deal of interesting information, presented to us in the form questions we'd each answer with our own clicker so it was anonymous, I found that the more interesting portion of the presentation involved the following opinion question: Are the RIAA (Music), MPAA (Motion Pictures), and ESA (Entertainment Software) disproportionately interested in file-sharing?

The answer for the most part was that they were disproportionately interested in file-sharing and Hardin mentioned that though this was an opinion question, for the most part it was a correct assumption. What we didn't pry further into because he had much more to show us was why we thought there was a disproportionate interest among these three companies.

Though the entertainment industry is a bit different from the tattoo industry, the same copyright laws affect both of them. I found an article written by a lawyer from New York named Marisa Kakoulas titled, 'The Tattoo Copyright Controversy'.

http://www.bmezine.com/news/guest/20031208.html

The article describes Kakoulas as she ventures to answer the question, 'Should Tattoos be Copyrighted?' She asks different people about their opinions and what they feel should be done. Not surprisingly, artists such as Pat Fish believe that a lawyer's work shouldn't get involved in anyway with a tattoo artist's work. However, another artist by the name of Elayne Angel got a pair of angel wings she did for a lawyer copyrighted because he insisted and she liked the idea.

The way that this ties back to the laws that we learned about in class is that these laws are beginning to affect more industries than ever. Fair Use, in my opinion, shouldn't still be the only means of defense against copyright infringement, especially when there are industries such as the tattoo industry where everything is such a free-for-all when it comes to whose work is whose.

That's all I have for now but I'll be writing more later.
- Adan

Facebook: The Campus Fad

The Facebook article addresses the phenomenom of a webpage that Facebook has become over the last few years.

Since Facebook has become so popular, practically every student on campus has it and it becomes another form of communication. Writing on people's walls, tagging people in notes, and sending messages back and forth like e-mail has made it even easier to stay in contact with people despite conflicting schedules and/or distances. Facebook can be used to help people study as well and since it can become a giant forum with the use of comments and notes, a note can be made of the notes taken in a class and people can post comments asking questions or answering other people's questions in the form of comments.

It's a fact that because Facebook is so widely used, it's a big part of daily life on college campuses with internet and it can provide the resource of constant, unique feedback like a forum while also providing the intimacy of e-mail with the inbox function.

If you'd like to read the article for yourself, click here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/1213/p13s01-legn.html

Till later.
- Adan

#1 : Word Experience and Techniques From Chapters 1 - 3

Bonjour, Ni hao, 'ello.

Here as titled, is my previous Word experience as well as techniques and other things that caught my eye.

I'd been using Word since I was in school having been blessed to have a computer class pretty much every year of elementary school. (For those of you who may or may not remember, Kid Pix was and still is the most epic program ever.) I'm pretty familiar with the layout of Word thanks to these classes having used it to write papers and to learn to type without looking at the keyboard. In the BCIS class I took in high school, I became familiar with the block style when used for writing business letters as listed in the exercises of Chapter 2.

The Publisher program of Microsoft Office is the only program mentioned in Chapter 1 that I don't know how to use so I'd like to learn about that.

In Chapter 2, Document Collaboration was the feature mentioned that I wasn't familiar with at all because I hadn't used it before. It seems like a handy tool to know how to use when working in a group on a presentation or with a tutor or editor on a paper or article.

Finally, in Chapter 3, using clip art and positioning graphics with the new Word has proven to be a bit difficult for me so that would be another thing I'd like to review.

That's all for the moment so until next time.
- Adain

Me?..

Hello, hello. My name's Adan and I have a sense of humor. So I'm open to nicknames. I've been known to answer even to expletives though I wouldn't recommend going that far unless you're willing to accept that in return. I have many nicknames as it is to choose from, so it won't be necessary to use anything from your four-letter-word vocabulary: Adain, Damian, Uhdawn, King George, Gizmo, and Aladdin among others. Adain (uh-dane) is the most recent and common nickname.
If you're going to ask me which I prefer, I'll tell you to do whatever makes you happy because I'll try to pay attention either way and flat out tell you if I can't or I won't.

I was born and raised in Laredo, Texas. I love to write and express myself through music, stories, poetry and at times art. I also like to think I'm good at said means of expression. Having put that out there, my secret fact is that I want to travel to Europe one day as some kind of performer to perform and travel around a continent I've always wanted to see. Aside from a student run orchestra/groups-of-students-doing-crazy-stuff-with-instruments group called Tuche, I haven't joined any music ensembles or done any plays or displayed any art here at Trinity yet but I feel that soon, the time for all that will come.

Now for places, the Google Earth wasn't being good to me and the links have been getting fixed all afternoon, so I improvised and technically used Google Earth to get these pictures but had to print screen them and get links to the pictures by other means so bare with me. I went through way too much trouble to get two pictures to not put them both here so here are my two favorite places in my hometown. This first link is to a picture of Church's Chicken.

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x196/adnadedamien/Place2-ChurchsChicken.jpg

This is my favorite place to get friiiiiied chicken. And yes... There's a difference between fried chicken, and friiiiiied chicken (5 more Is, yes.) To put it briefly, I've had many laughs with my friends here, coming at odd hours cursing them for not being open 24 hours like IHOP. Though I have to say it was probably just me cursing the place because I usually wanted friiiiiied chicken at their awesome price more often than anyone else anyway. And IHOP was too expensive. Why aren't there free refills on anything but water there? Not relevant but it made this Church's Chicken better to me. It also means a lot to me on a personal level. I actually went there when I went to celebrate getting into a highly selective liberal arts school called Swarthmore. That day, I feel I should mention I got a free hat from Church's Chicken which I still have with me to the day. I still demand the chicken on my birthday, too.

This next place is the Starbucks where I worked through my senior year of high school and 1st semester of college.

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x196/adnadedamien/Place1-Starbucks.jpg

It's my second home because I'd been there at all hours of the day, having opened in the summer at 4:30 a.m. and then closed in the winter, getting out as late as 2 in the morning. So I guess the only hour I haven't been there is maybe 3 a.m. Still, how many other places besides where you sleep can you say you've been at every hour of the day?

It's my favorite place because I bonded with the environment even though I really detested it at first. Once I got a grip for working there though - and took fair advantage of the employee discounts - I began to understand how and why the environment was so inviting. With the exception of the strange kid with sunglasses that would come in at around 10 P.M. some nights and run away with our tip jar, it wasn't too out of the ordinary. In fact, it was easy to feel connected with everyone who worked there because if you didn't like them, you could still talk to them about switching shifts and chances are, they'd do it. Sometimes they wouldn't show up, and you'd get in trouble, so you'd really have something against them, but they usually forget about those kinds of things and then ask you to make their drinks. Karma?... Well, whatever side of the counter you're on, I'd say yes.

Before I worked at Starbucks, I worked as an assistant computer technician for a small private computer company in Laredo called M1 Networks. I learned a lot about computers, such as how to format hard drives, find viruses, use the force (kidding), and set up land lines and some wireless equipment.

I spoke a lot of Spanish and did a lot of traveling throughout South Texas with this job learning from my boss Julio, his father Julio, and the real boss, Julio (again kidding; the other two were Julio; the real boss was Mr. Solis.) I traveled to many small cities in South Texas such as Zapata, Benavides, and San Ygnacio among others to help set up networks, printers, and computers. I would climb through roofs and walls at construction sites or schools that were open over the summer to help set up wires that needed to be put in new classrooms and/or office buildings. I also learned how to build and take apart certain computers when I didn't travel with them.

So to recap,
I'm from Laredo, Texas.
My secret fact is that I want to travel to Europe as a performer.
I look like Aladdin to some people, hense that nickname.
I'm a recently ex-communicated barista.
I like to express myself through writing, and other random art forms, thinking I'm good at it.
I like Fried Chicken.
And I obviously don't know all there is to know about computers though I've had my fair share with them.

If writing about the class this semester will be as fun as it was writing this blog, then I'm glad I failed.
For the final bit of the record, My e-mail is: agonzal4@trinity.edu

Au revoir.
- Adain