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.

Pictures that Lie

On the website Pictures that Lie there are a multitude of different photoshopped photos that misrepresent what actually took place in the photograph. I chose to analyze the picture on the cover of the University of Wisconsin Undergraduate Application taken by Haney Farid, because it shows how far some people are willing to go to achieve what they want. The picture is at a football game with several students cheering, the main photo is from a 1993 football game but on the left is a black student from a 1994 photo. It was manipulated by basically copying and pasting the image of the black student into the picture. The school did this because they wanted a picture that reflected diversity; unfortunately they had to doctor the photo to do so. I do not believe the manipulation was very harmful, the black student was a real Wisconsin student and I think it’s a good thing that Wisconsin wants to show they are diverse; of course a better way would have been to have taken a legitimate photo.

CLT Visit

Before class on thursday I had no idea what the CLT had to offer. RobertChapman guided us through this very interesting area in the library and I learned a lot of new things. There was a lab with computers to do photo editing and video editing, a room with mac desktops, and a few other utilities. The photo and video editing area were two places that would be very useful for CS 1300 and my other classes. If I needed photos for a powerpoint or needed to do a video presentation the software available at CLT would be very helpful. What interested me most, however, was the sound editing room. It held a high quality condenser microphone, a keyboard, and its computer has Pro Tools, the best sound recording and editing software available. I will definitely be visiting this room for my personal projects because I am growing tired of my inferior recording software.

Jason Hardin came to class to talk to us about copyright laws. Copyright violations are federal crimes, plagiarisms are ethical violations. Copyright-legal recognition on part of the government ensures creators of their work that they can control the production of their work and profit from it. Copyright originated in 1790, and is in the constitution and predates the bill of rights.
We learned that copyright is imortant becasue it promotes individuality, and intellectual development, innovation, creativity, industrial progression etc.
A copyright is good for the authors life plus 70 years, it was originally 14 years.
The law used to be 50 years after death, but Disney got their representative to take it to the house and change it. It’s a felony to commit a copyright infringement involving more than 10 copies and a value of more than 2500 dollars. HEOA-must make an annual disclosure to students about copyright and campus policies, must develop a plan to combat unauthorized file sharing to include the use of technology-based-deterrents, and must implement a system to provide alternatives to illegal downloading. It was interesting to know that you don’t have to submit copyright forms to have copyright. This was interesting to me because I did some copyrighting of my own over the summer when I recorded an album. Creative Commons is an interesting website that provides different forms of copyrights.

Fair Use:
Not all educational use is fair use, and it is less defensible to recreate commercial works. Intended purpose of reproduction is a factor when looking at fair use cases. One factor the court looks at is the effect of reproduction on revenue stream.


Copyight Laws by Taylor Stratton is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Trinity Network Diagram

We took a tour with Jared Pack. He explained to us how the trinity network works from building to building and this is the map I made putting his words into graphic form. We got to see some of the campus servers downstairs in Halsell where the Y drive, Class and Group servers are. Here is a diagram I made of the Trinity Network as it makes its way from my dorm room. It describes the function of several key building and their roles.

Computer Tech Tips

Joe Hatch came for a visit to our class last thursday and provided us with a multitude of technical pointers for our computers. One of the tips I found most useful was he reccomended that we all back up our important files with a backup drive. If a virus infiltrates our personal computers we won't have to fret because they will be safely stored on the external backup drive. I could have used this in the past when my laptop crashed and all the files were corrupted by a virus. I think everyone should look into buying one because its the best way to ensure your files are safe.

Response to Introductions

I had a great time looking over all the different blogs people wrote and found out interesting things about all of them. Everyone's seemed professional and very informative. I left comments on Tim's and CJ's walls: http://cjrobison.blogspot.com/ and http://tnelin.blogspot.com/

Intro to Me

Hi my name is Benjamin Stratton (but I prefer my middle name Taylor), and I'm from Fort Worth, Texas. You can email me here. I was actually born in Chicago, but moved to Fort Worth when I was two and consider myself a full-fledged Texan. In high school I once won a talent show covering “Love Story” by Taylor Swift. I am now a freshman at Trinity University in San Antonio and am currently planning a major in mathematics/biology on the pre-med track. I have a younger sister (age 15), a brother (age 13), and a Jack-Russell Terrier named Scooter. I have a broad range of interests but the two I enjoy most are sports and music. My sports include volleyball, basketball and track and I have recently begun the process of starting up a men's club volleyball team at Trinity. I play an array of instruments including violin, guitar, mandolin, and piano. This past summer my band recorded our debut album with producer Geoff Rockwell at Maximedia Studios (which boasts artists including Justin Timberlake, Mariah Carey, Metro Station, Timbaland) and have played with the likes of Rocket Summer and Forever the Sickest kids. You can listen here. My campus activities include intramurals and environmental club. My computer background consists of a basic computer science high school class as well as some website construction using html, and I frequently have used Microsoft Word and Powerpoint. My goals in CS 1300 this semester are to increase my word and excel literacy, refresh and expand my html knowledge as well as get a better grasp on graphic design.