Lots of revelation about Excel.

What did I know about Excel before going to Trinity? It is a Microsoft program which can help people do calculations faster, more conveniently and also give out always exact answers.

But how could I use it to help me? Don't ask me because I simply had no idea.

And then after 2 weeks, I feel Excel is the unlimited resource with uncountable already set-up functions which I may never use up. Like so many other students, I learn Excel for my real life and my real Statistics and Chemistry Laboratory class. If it was not for Excel, how could you calculate the mean, the standard deviation, variance, confidence interval and so many other difficult-to-remember terms of more than 20 different elements? The same question for the value of different cations' concentration in a five or six significant figures. But Excel is not simply about calculation, I just found out that I can also use some other functions like "If", which is totally new to me. Honestly, I havenot used "Filter" and "Sort" before, so I think that these functions are marvellous. Besides this awesomeness, Excel formatting seems somehow unappealing to me. It is more complicated than dealing with Microsoft files as you have to edit both the cells themselves and the inside content. Also, the conditional formatting may be sometimes confusing.

After all, Excel is a wonderful program and it is really helpful with Statistics students like me.

COPYRIGHT AND SO MANY UNKNOWN THINGS

This Tuesday, we had a talk with Mr. Jason Hardin about copyright and how to avoid copyright infringement. It is truly a lesson with so many original things dominating my mind. It is the first time I have ever used "Turning Point", the software that I found in a computer in the Coates Library later on. And also It is the first time I have been fully aware that something I did in the past was illegal, but lucky me, I was not in the US.

Personally, copyright is the term I have barely heard of before. In my homeland, the idea of copy-right is not so widespread, not to mention that someone can be totally ignorant of it.

I have gained much information about US copyright law dated from 1790 which aims to develop the useful contribution of art and sciences to better develop our society. Basically, if authors know that everyone using their products has to pay them a certain amount of money, they will have greater incentives to follow their inspritation. Also, the term of copyright for US published works is now author’s life plus 70 years. I and so many other students wondered about the 70 additional years but then Leslie and Mr. Hardin successfully answered our curiosity. Though this extension as well as the copyright itself is somehow monetary, it does contain "fai use", which allows limited use of copyrighted material free of charge for some purposes such as commentary, criticism, news reporting, research, teaching or scholarship.

Now I know a lot more about it, which also means that I have to be much more careful whenever I involve in making a copy, downloading a song or sharing files with my friends.

Thanks Mr. Hardin, Ms. Belisle and all my classmates for such a helpful class.

COPY RIGHT AND SO MANY UNKNOWN THINGS by HANG BUI is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

MY TRINITY NETWORK DIAGRAM

Last week, I and my class joined a tour of Trinity's Server Room and met Jared Pack, a Trinity alumnus as well as asystems administrator. After the talk, I learnt a lot about back-ups, security and how ITS administrators maintain and update the huge system. Once I put all my essential files into my personal Y: Drive, I will never lose them even when my computer crashes. Not only safer data, I also can enjoy safer web-surfing thanks to Trinity firewall system. But the most important things I gained from the tour is Trinity University network and how data is transmitted among different building on campus as well as off-campus, also what I tried to reflect on my diagram. I should have elaborated more on how personal computers, wireless access points and data closets link with each other but actually I run out of space. Anyway, I hope you can still understand how the system works. Thanks so much for taking a look at my diagram.

Where is the Trinity mystery spot in my picture?

The place may look similar to those living in nearby dormitory halls, but if you live in Herndon, Beze or McLean, I think it will be much more tricky. Though I myself live near this location, I actually did not discover it until last week, when I and my friends walked back to my hall from Calvert. Surprisingly, what captured us was neither the chair nor the flower pot, but a flock of cats in different colors. They impressed me so deeply that right after hearing of the assignment, I immediately know what would be in my picture. There would be cats, flower pot and chair, (but when I came there, I could not find any cats around so I ended up with a no-cat-picture) and absolutely Picnik. I used Picnik mostly to rotate my picture, crop it into a smaller size and change the composition into "cross process" and sharpen the picture a little bit. It hurt me so much to think about whether I should put some text or image into my picture or not; but then I decided that it would be so crowded for such a small picture. 

I want my picture to be a little classic and relaxing so there was not so much adjustment to it. Hope that all of you will love it and more importantly know where it is.

Best Tech Tip (6)

Joe Hatch’s Computer Survival Skills was far more interesting and beneficial than I had expected. Mr. Hatch talked a lot about different ways I can protect my computer from threats, phising and virus. However, the most important part of the talk, in my opinion, is about CCleaner. I felt so much merrier when knowing that I can use this efficient program for my Toshiba, and knowing that with merely a few simple clicks, my laptop can run much faster then. Another major theme of Computer Survival Skills was computer securities, which I was totally ignorant of before. Now, thanks to Mr. Hatch, I have become much more alert to replying the suspicious emails, clicking on any link from unofficial addresses or unknown senders and giving out my personal information on the Internet.