Advice for the new class!

You will find this class most useful for the rest of your time at Trinity, so make sure you attend every single class!

Class Webpages

Making a website was the most fun and the most challenging out of all the activities we had to do for this class. I was really amazed at the creativity and talent of my classmates. One of the websites I liked the most was Ralph Petang's, he made a website about traveling and fine dining, both of which I enjoy very much. His choice of pictures was incredible. Another website I enjoyed looking at was Case Kay's, and what I liked the most is that it was very original and funny at the same time. Joy had to my choice the best website in the class, it looked very professional and her use of colors was very interesting.

Please visit my own website at http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~avargast

Advantages of HTML code

When building a webpage, you are using HTML whether you use web development software or not. All the web development tools do is create HTML code for you. These tools seem attractive because they appear to be easier than learning coding but it becomes inconvenient when dealing with complicated pages that carry a lot of information.

Here is a quote from a friend


"The problem lies in the underlying code, HTML is a language that describes information, a package like Dreamweaver knows nothing about this information or how its structured just how it is to be presented.

By writing HTML by hand you can describe the information correctly which has a number of advantages. Google will be able to read and understand far more about your site for example. If the HTML is to be used with other technologies such as PHP or a content management system, development will be far easier (and therefore cheaper)."
- David P

PowerPoint Presentations from class

Well first of all, I am very sorry that I only got to see two other presentaions other than mine. Marlies and David did a very good job with presenting their topic of interest. Both of the topics are areas of study that I am not very familiar with and it was very nice to learn a little about philosophy and chemistry.

Chris Nolan's presentation.

One of the things that I was most interested in was to learn more about google, because it seems that virtually everybody uses it and prefers it over the other search engines. Today google's search engine is used by more than 60% of the people that use the internet. How did they gain control of the market so quickly is still not very clear to me, but their model of search engine has proven to be easy and useful for the average user of the internet.
The other information that I found very interesting was the worldcat site that has recorded millions and millions of books in libraries all over the continental U.S. For the most part, I feel that I can find any book I may need in my school library but if I am ever in need of a very specialized book, I can visit worldcat and find in what library near me that book is found.

Powerpoint Advice

I felt like the articles on Powerpoint were extremely useful. Over the past four years I've made more than a dozen presentations and had to watch twice as many, whether it was in a classroom, work, or a conference I've have witnessed some very useful and well planed presentations but for the most part it has been painful to listen to someone read out loud their information. It seems that it would be easy to make a clear and simple presentation with powerpoint since it is very easy and straight forward to use, but people often feel the need to include all of their information on the slides. Here are some tips that that I learned from Guy Kawasaki, a venture capitalist that listens to business proposals all day and shares his insight of what works and doesn't work when trying to sell something.

a presentation should be:
1 clear
2 concise
3 precise
4 coherent
5 captivating

If you wanna check out G. kawasaki and his his advice on how to pitch a business idea using powerpoint follow the link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJtK7D90XgQ

Doctored Photographs

I chose picture #7, in this photograph a british soldier seems to be looking after Iraqi refugees and asking them to take cover.

This image first appeared in April 2003 on the front page of the Los Angeles Times shortly after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq

A soldier was cropped and pasted in a photograph of a refugee camp.

The way I see it, this photograph was manipulated for two reasons, the first reason is that they did not have a good picture of the ally troops doing something humanitarian during the invasion. The second reason is that the photograph portrays the invading countries as the good guys and it serves as excellent PR if you are promoting the war.

The manipulation was harmful because it deceives the public of what the army is really doing in the invaded country. It is dishonest and it defends the argument that going to war was a good choice, which proves that someone is covering the truth from the public.