Comment for students of the next semester

Take the class and see how it works out for you; you do need to finish homework on time and last but not least, try to finish your homework in the way you would like it to look, but not just finish it :( (oh well, I actually need more than one sentence).

Re: Student Websites

Firstly, I love Laura's website. The very first thing that I extremely in love with in her site is the good blend of different backgrounds in different sites. Her idea is quite similar to my inital intention, as I searched for different backgrounds sharing black as their main color. However, I failed to do this because there werenot so many backgrounds with black so I was amazed at her great job. Moreover, she organized everything in a greatly neat way and it is super easy to navigate among her different pages.

Secondly, I also love Leslie's Navbar and her font. They are awesome. The only thing I do not really like is that her backgrounds (though they are super nice and stylish) get really distracting and complicated sometimes. As a result, I do not really pay attention to the content but only her backgrounds. Moreover, as the image she used as background image is too small, many have to be used and they create kinds annoying borders among them. Other than that, her site is really stylish and I guess she must be really picky in choosing different pictures to put in her page as all of them are well blended with each other in terms of color and size.

Thirdly, I love the sweetness and simplicity of Kemble's site. She didnot use many images. She didnot use Youtube either. She didnot do any "fancy" thing. But when I look at her pages, I felt peaceful, nice and harmonious. All the pages except from default one share one theme, text color and font. The only thing she should consider is to make a little more impressive nav-bar, to keep stronger attention from the audience.

Overall, my class made a great attempt. Congrazt, all of you guys :D

website

Please visit my personal site at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~hbui
First of all, making a site was ways much easier than what I thought it should be. When we first learnt about hand-coding in Notepad, I thought that we would have to hand-code every single detail of our personal site (the idea would be ridiculous) and remember every code of adding links, adding pictures or tables. However, thanks to Expression Web, things have become much easier. Only one thing I got trouble with Expression Web is the initial difficulty to open my site with this software. I thought I continually clicked Open while I was supposed to click "Open Site" and that explains why I didnot get what my classmates had on their screens.

The page that I mostly proud of is my default. I spent so much time on just choosing the background because I know that most people will just look at my homepage to see if there is anything interesting. If it is not able to capture people's attention, it is no point building other pages. At first, I decided to use the orange and yellow dot background, which seems more harmonious with texts and pictures. I also experimented with other banal backgrounds, another which is similar to the dot and the other with retro decorations. All of them were nice to some extent, but too banal to attract attention. Finally, I changed my mind to use the black one with the letter/symbol I myself cannot define it just with the hope that my site can become more attractive. I was also proud of my Nav-bar though I know that it doesnot look the way it is supposed to be. But I am happy with my picture and my decision to change the hue/saturation to make the pictures look less weird.

My biggest technical problem is to navigate among a huge number of pictures I stored in the image folder. I didnot know that once I moved the picture from one folder to another, it would not show up in the published page. As a result, all of my pictures in places disappeared when I moved them into a sub-folder inside images. I was totally freaked out but luckily calm enough to figure what was wrong with my page. I also had problems with the way I put images in the table. When I saw all my images in Expression Web, they looked nice and neat with one next to another. However, when I published my site, they spread out all over the place and made me so annoyed. As a result, I tried to increase the pixel of the table and it worked. Super nice!!!

I will show my site to my sister and my friends, who were continuously keeping complaining about my bad computer skill. They should know how my IT skill has improved since I got to Trinity. Besides the page, they also could have a look at what I have been doing in IT class so far as I already put all my CSCI products into the Computer Science's Work page. They should know how I worked with superb Excel table, changed the texture of images and made them look more professional as well as my postcard with the help of Adobe Photoshop.

And lastly, just wanna say MY PAGE IS AWESOME :X and I definitely will create others for other classes.

Larry's talk about computer purchase :)

Today, Larry came and talk to us about different parts of a laptop, explained to us how expensive they are and how careful we should be when using our laptops.

But the first thing is about backing up. He brought us both the good news and the bad news. The bad news is that how you can lose your files and fire your laptop so easily. He gave us two examples of 2 young ladies. The first one lost all her images of 4 years in Trinity because her hard-drive got crashed. And the other lost her dissertation as her laptop fell down to the pool and hence got fired. I have never evaluated the true importance of backing up until I heard those sad stories. As much money you can put on, you will never see your files again once your laptop gets fired or your hard-drive collapses. But the good news is that we have tons of ways to back them up. Here we go!!!!  Thanks to the technology, Trinity students now have space to store their stuff, not like years ago. As a result, you always want to put all your essential files into Y-Drive, or a portable hard-drive if you have one.

So BACK UPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPP AND DON'T WAIT TO DO THAT UNTIL U LOOSE SOMETHING IMPORTANT.

The second point is that you always want to be careful while using your computer. Below are few bullet points you need to remember:

Never spray anything on your monitor.

Make sure ur laptop is unplugged before you wipe it.

Be careful whenever you eat/drink something while using laptops because any drop/spiltting can fire everything.

The third point is going with a Dell. He made me regret because I already purchased a Toshiba at the beginning of the semester. However, now I know it and I am gonna tell everyone who is gonna buy a laptop to choose Dell. If any problem ever happens with your Dell laptop, Dell will replace them without any cost. The story about his son was really funny and woke me up after a long day of classes but I think I am not brave enough to pour one gallon of iced tea into my Dell and watch how it fires.

Awesome class, full of information and Larry is a funny guy too.

my picture that tells a white lie and a bunch of analysis. Let's have a look :D

If you ever had the same concern with me about ethical issues in image manipulation, I bet that you should read this entry. Some think that it's unethical to alter any images and deceive your audience whatsoever. From the view of these people, pictures are pure realities without any prejudice or preference. However, it turns out that every image ever captured is in some way a distortion of reality (Salvo). The way in which the photographers crop their views even before pushing the buttons or putting the images into the computers already distorted the pure truth. The truth can be a whole thing, but what if a photographer only pointed the len on a proportion of the whole?

As a result, it is not image population through either Adobe Photoshop, Picasa or Picnik that deceives the audience in a negative way. Image population, in a positive side, can really change people's minds and question their obsolete assumptions. That's what so many social issue advertising campaign did, and that is also what I tried to do with my own.

What I chose to manipulate is a picture of beer pouring, and the picture was somehow simple with half a bottle and a full mug of beer. I made several changes to the picture and thus raised awareness of people about drinking. The photo originally was found on istockphoto.com and I just pasted the link here for anyone who wants to know how my editing makes the picture look so much more weird and worse than it was, haha, just kidding lol. http://www.istockphoto.com/stock-photo-2668578-beer-pouring-in-to-mug.php. At first, I came up with the idea of using the beaker, which helps me illustrate the slogan "measure your drink". However, I failed to find any beaker with beer (why didnot lab teacher/chemist do that??It looks fun, haha) and integrate the beer part (in beer mug) with the empty beaker. I technically can do this if I changed the opacity of the beer part, so the beer part looks like be inside the beaker. However, other problem arose as the beer part cannot fit exactly within the area inside the beaker (beaker and beer mug have different sizes and different shapes though). Because of all these above problems, I ended up putting a ruler besides the mug though you donot often measure liquid with ruler lol. Noticing that there was a siginificant difference between the color of the ruler and the rest of the picture, I changed the hue/saturation so they can well fit with each other. And the last thing I did, to ensure everyone get my really really sophisicated and awkward idea, is to put the slogan in the middle.
I have no hope that it will change something in a wide scale, no way no way :(. But I really wish that everyone ever visiting my blog should tell themselves the message "measure your drinK".

Work cited:Salvo, Suzanne. "True lies." Communication World 25.5 (2008): 26-30. Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 10 Nov. 2010.

Omg, my presentation was horrible :(

I sucked in this presentation :((. Sorry guys. I wished I had spent more time on it and made it better. And I wished others hadnot done that good so mine wouldnot have looked that bad in comparison with others'. Haha, just kidding though.
I definitely learnt  a lot from today. The first lesson is ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS BEING PREPARED. Honestly, I didnot have much time last weekend because I had to prepare for the upcoming quizzes and tests. That partially explains why my presentation went by just without any strong impression. Also, I should have figured out how to use the mouse of Ms. Belisle's computer. It was so tricky when a mouse is used for 2 computers and u keep looking at the left screen and moving the mouse to the right (the mouse will be moved into the right screen). The second lesson is the one I learnt from Leslie. Both her excellence in design and more importantly, her strong strong strong enthusiasm made her presentation stand out.
Two other presentations I love are Lauren's and Leslie's. I really love Lauren's because her story of Zode is really nice. It is awesome to think that a person spent 36 hours and a half to figure out which way he is gonna take and ended up taking both opposite directions at the same time, which was just more than a brilliant idea. And Leslie's is totally awesomeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. I am really really thinking about switching major now, though one thing I worry about is whether I can handle all the heavy work load of graphic designing classes :(
Anyway, today is a good chance to learn new things. Everything is good except for my horrible presentation. :(

Dr. Chris Nolan and the talk on how to wisely search for information on the Internet :D

Dr. Chris Nolan came to our class on Thursday and talked about how to search for information on the Internet. The computer I used in the class must have had some problems because it didnot save everything I noted. Despite this unluckiness, the lesson I gained from him is so memorable and practical that I figured out that I am writing this entry without referring back to the note at all.

First thing about the share of the searching market. I was really surprised by the fact that Google accounted for only 66%, far less than what I thought it would. Anyway, it was good to know about other searching websites besides Google, such as AOL, Bing, Baidu (a couple of my Chinese friends use it) and Yahoo. Set aside from these figures, I learned a lot more about how to navigate among a huge source of information coming out from Google. I, as well as my classmates, often look at only several results on the first page so we should be able to make sure that what we are looking for is reliable, academic and relevant to the topic. However, what really happens is that in 99% of the case, the scholar source would not appear until the very end page. To solve this issue, Dr. Nolan strongly advised us to search for scholar source on the top right of the screen before going any further. The other good thing to know is how to search for the definitions by putting the word define and the colon before the word.

Second useful thing is how to determine which source is academic and how to navigate to the academic source much more efficiently. Any academic source should include footnotes and references, which can help you choose other better sources from a magazine or an article. For example, the magazine might be an interview between the journalist and a famous expert in the field, whose works might be useful for you. Utilizing the advances search and typing in the domains like gov and edu are also several methods that Dr. Nolan gave us.

Thank you so much for bringing us so much much much information. I am sure to apply all of them in the research process of every paper I am gonna write.