Power point-things I hate and love

Honestly admitting, I am not a powerpoint person, might be excel person as I mostly use excel for almost all of my classes. However, I am glad that I still have some experience with powerpoint to share.

• Firstly, I really hate the way songs are added in PowerPoint. Because there are so many slides in one powerpoint file, what I often want is to match the music (in terms of lyrics and tone) with what is going on in each slide. However, I could never do that and I do not really know if Powerpoint does not allow us to do so or simply because I do not know how to get to it.
• Secondly, animations sometimes make me feel annoyed. I do know how to add animations to each of my slide, but I do not know how to make them well matched together. Sometimes I put all really complicated animations into one Powerpoint file so it did not look really professional. But I personally do not want to use the simply an dull ones either (namely fading, sliding to the left or to the right). The key is how to mix these ones smoothly together.
• Thirdly, I am totally screwed up each time I am trying to add background pictures. What happen most of the time is that the pictures I find are not large enough to cover the whole slide and I have to stretch them a little bit. However, stretching them will make them look awkward like the tiger we made in class today.

Despite these disadvantages, it is undeniable that I love powerpoint, though less than excel because it is really a useful, convenient and time-saving tool of presentation. Back to the time when I didnot know how to use powerpoint, preparing for presentations was a real pain with me. It often took me days (DAYS, not hours guy) to draw outlines and pictures. However, things have now become much more organized and faster with Powerpoint. All you need is to choose layouts, add background pictures (optional though), type in key words and hit enter. Things will get done amazingly quickly.

the trip to CLT

Today I and my class had the visit to the CLT center. Honestly, I have never been there before so it is kinda cool to visit the first time, see a bunch of Macs and Pcs together. As every other lab in Trinity have only , it was so exciting to know that I can use Mac here. Moreover, thanks to Mr. Chapman, I learn a lot more about what I can take advantage of in CLT. It is the place where I can look for personal help in editing videos and images. Also, the computers here look much much nicer and more modern than those on the third floor of the library. Personally, I think I might need to go there pretty soon as I have to create an ad campaign for my Creativity and Entrepreneur behavioral class. I will need to make either a video, or a Power Point slides which require graphic skills while I obviously have no understanding about. However, learning new stuff will be awesome and I will soon come back. anyway, I wish CLT was on the third floor so walking seems less than a pain :(

And I bonus u guys with my own superrrrrrrrrrrrr nice picture/scan file.

Have a good weekend and I am getting excited about the fall break.

Image manipulation

The first thing captured my attention in this picture are these horns coming out from rabbits' heads. Later on, I realized that they donot suppose to be really weird with any Americans, but I, as have never seen them before, or at least have never been to Colorado, thought rabbits with antlers were an amazing and somehow crazy idea.  But honestly, I find quirky ideas pretty creative and it is also the reason why I chose this one out of 24 pictures. Rabbit are often the most tamed animal ever in the world and you hardly see them evoke. But what happen if they are added horns? They related me much to a strong and highly aggressive buffaloes which are willing for a harsh fight.

The comment on the right didnot mention much about image manipulation. But what I guess is that photographer might have changed the composition into black and white, as well as added the antlers to the rabbits. The black and white composition was a marvellous idea, as it created mythical and classic context for jackalope coming out. And despite the seemingly unmatch between horns and rabbits, it is such an intelligent idea because it brought a completely original thought to viewers: rabbit might no long be rabbits, if they are added strong horns.

And I chose a short video in Youtube, naming Retouching: Before and after. This was kind of long than what I really want, but then I found it so interesting. Did you ever know that 100% of fashion photos are retouched before being published? Though I am not totally agreeing on retouching because it can cause false expectations in most women and men, I feel that retouching is essential with magazine editors. Noone will ever lift up the magazine if you post an overweigh, wrinkled woman at her middle age, except from health magazine anyway. 

But then, knowing that there is certain level of lie behind each picture really helps. It awakes most women and men from their 100% perfect models

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.