Advice for the Young Ones

CS1300, you will find, is a very helpful class. You will learn to navigate excel, word, and others with ease. There are a few tips I would like to give for CS1300 students of the future. First, GO TO CLASS! You learn everything that your homework is on in class and some of it would be quite difficult to teach yourself. Second, do ALL of your homework and do it on time, your grade in the class is a large part homework. Third, get your projects and homework out of the way early. Trust me, you don't want to be scrambling to find a computer that has a limited access program on it, only to find that the only few computers with the program are taken by other students who waited to the last minute. This will also give you time to ask questions if you have them. Pay attention in class, something complicated may slip by you in 5 seconds of zoning out and you will be clueless the rest of class. Good luck!

Favorite Sites

While browsing around our classes websites, I must say I was very impressed. I really liked CJ's site because of his unique navbar. He combined cool photoshopped blue tigers with links to the other pages of his site. I also liked Tim Nelin's, he had great picture arrangement and his navbar was also very nice to look at. Erin Dooley's also caught my eye. Her clean and professional pages and helpful links made for a very nice site. All the sites from each student were very impressing and showed that we are learning a lot in CS1300.

My Website

Please visit my website at cs.trinity.edu/~bstratto.

Making site was actually easier than I thought, programs such as Microsoft Expression Web and KompoZer really facilitated its design. I primarily used Kompozer but did the hotspots in Expression, and hand coded and embedded a video. I was most proud of my music section because it had a photoshop photo I made, (the black and white one with red guitars), an embedded video of one of my performances, and a link to listen to my music by clicking on the album cover. I would have maybe changed my background and made it more elaborate. The biggest technical challenge was figuring out how to embed a video properly. The biggest design challenge was making my navbar in photoshop, and moving it to kompozer, then further editing it in expression. I will show my site to any friends and family who are interested, as well as anyone who happens to stumble across it. I probably will make another site in another class for maybe a project.

Pics that lie

I chose this picture of neil armstrong landing on the moon because it was such a monumental achievement so why not insert a little comedy?Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. took the photograph with a Hasselblad 70mm camera during the expedition. I manipulated it by taking a photo of a toy astronaut golfing and inserting him in the photo and blending him using the clone tool. I also brightened the ball. I then edited a sign for a country club and inserted it and blurred it to match the photo. I added bright patches to the toy astronaut to match where the sun was hitting armstrong. I don't think it was harmful because it was all in good fun.

The article I read "Claims of Photo Fakery Get a Lot of Exposure in Court" related to my photo as to the harmfulness of editing photos. I believe that there are many criteria to determine this and it all depends on how detrimental the additions are.

Nelson, Emily. "Claims of photo fakery get lots of exposure in court." Wall Street Journal.

229.27 (1997): B2. Print.

HTML Code

HTML code (hyper text markup language) is the fundamental basis for anything and everything on the internet. However, it would become incredibly tedious to have to make such complex sites seen on the web simply by typing away various code on notepad. To combat this software is available to make webpages easier, such as dreamweaver and Microsoft Expression. However, it is still important for to know how to use HTML. Think of it as if we were never taught math but simply given a calculator at age 4 and told it can solve any problem for us. It is necessary to know the fundamentals in order to understand what is going on in the bigger picture, or in this case the design software.

Lazily Discussing Laziness- Photoshop Collage

I chose to do a collage displaying laziness because I knew during the weekend that I would be working on it I would be very lazy, as is usual on weekends. So I decided to use a pic of my friends and I chatting lazily, with my favorite Trinity cat and another pic of my suite mates napping to look as if we were, lazily, thinking of laziness.

Chris Nolan Visits CS1300

Chris Nolan, Assistant University Librarian, came to our class on Tuesday to talk to us about searching on the web. Although I thought that I knew plenty about how to search for things online he provided us with a plethora of new information about Google and other search engines. One thing I always had wondered was how Google made money. We learned that they make the billions of dollars they make every year off the many little advertisements on the side of your searches. Something that surprised me was that companies try to find ways to manipulate search engines to display the hits for their site by making lots of blogs or sub-sites that connect to their website. Google has taken steps to prevent this with different search algorithms. Google also uses algorithms to refine your search to give you the most efficient search experience they can.