Piece of Advice

For all the incoming students, I really encourage all of you to come every single day. If you fail to do this, you will most likely fall behind with all your work and trust me, you do not want to do that. As long as you keep up with all the homework, you should do great on the quizzes and tests. Mr. Belisle is a great person and she does not want anyone to do bad in her class so the only way you can fail this class is by being lazy.
You will learn really neat stuff about word, excel, Photoshop, PowerPoint and many other programs so all of you should take advantage of this great opportunity. Do not really stress about this class, instead just do your work and most importantly.....ENJOY!!!!!

Favorite Websites

Honestly, all the websites I have seen are incredible, but there are three of them that I liked the most. In Kemble's website I thought that the decoration she put on was really eye catching, especially the background picture in here default page. I also liked how she linked many of her pictures to really cool websites. Lisa's website was another one I thought was very interesting. Her navigation bar is just simply amazing, I can really tell she put in great effort in creating her website. A third one I really enjoyed reading and observing all the details was Lisa's. I was really impressed when I took a look at the photographs she included. She has visited really neat places and it just makes want to go and visit those cities.
I am 100% sure that every single one of us put in a lot of time and effort in making our websites and all that hard work is evident when we take a look at the websites. All of them are spectacular!!!!

Website

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~pybarra
Making my website was actually way easier than I thought. To be honest, when Ms. Belisle first told us that we were going to have to do a website I kind of felt that it was going to be impossible, but it turned out to be a lot of fun and maybe just a little frustrating, but not much. By using Microsot Expression Web and by getting help from Brittany and Ms. Belisle, I created a pretty cool website. I think the section I am most proud of is the one marked as "My Trips around Europe," because I included many photos I took when I traveled all over europe and then put them all together to create sort of collage. I really don't know what I would have changed because I pretty much included everything from me year in France, but maybe I could have done a better job on my navigation bar. I feel like it is kind of plain compared to the others I have see, but I mean I am still happy with the work I have accomplished. Now, my biggest technical challenge was probably fitting all the pictures and text into the tables. It was a little frustratin at times because I had to continuosly go back and change the dimensions of each picture and make sure they were the perfect size in order to fit in the table. My biggest design challenge was creating the collage of all my pictures I took while I traveled in Europe. It was not a really difficult task, but it did take me a while to complete it. I am definitely going to show off my website to my family and to all my friends and host-families in France since I included them into my site. After learning how to use Kompozer and Expression Web, I am definitely going to make another website.

Larry Hechler

After listening to Larry Hechler in class today I am definitely going to buy a Dell the next time I need a laptop. Larry explained that whenever you buy a Dell there is a 4 year care plan that comes along with the purchase. This 4 year care plan covers your computer for 4 complete years. It has actually saved Mr. Hechler from purchasing five new laptops. Another very interesting tip he gave us was on how to clean our computers. He explained that we should never use any liquid that contains alcohol, any form of ammonia or acetone. This will destroy the screen and cause you to buy a brand new LCD. It is also crucial to make sure that your computer is unplugged whenever you are using a wet cloth to wipe the fingerprints, dust, etc. off the monitor .

He also described several ways of backing up files. We can either use a DVD, an external hard drive or the y-drive which is actually backed up daily by ITS. The y-drive is the best option for backing up files if you are a Trinity student. He gave us various examples of students who had lost many important files because something had happened to their computers and they had not taken the time to back up the important files. One of the last tips he gave us was on how to get out computer battery last longer. He explained that we should run the battery down until we get the warning sign once a month in order for it to have a longer duration. Thanks to Larry Heckler, I have learned many useful tips today and will definitely reflect back to them whenever I buy a new laptop

My Own Picture that "Lies"

The way I created my picture that "lies" (notice that lies is in quotation marks because this picture actually sends out a very important and TRUE message) was by getting a photograph of Barack Obama, one of Evo Morales (president of Bolivia), another one of  Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (president of Brazil) and finally one of Felipe Calderon (president of Mexico), cutting off the head of each president by using the magic extractor and pasting each head on top of the photograph of Mount Rushmore, which I got from Google images as well. After pasting each head on top of the Mount Rushmore photograph I did my best at adjusting the opacity, the brightness, and the contrast of each head in order for them to be somewhat blended into the picture. Below each head, I typed in the name of each country with the font color resembling one of the colors in the country's flag. Then, with a large font size, I typed in "American Presidents," using the colors of the 4 flags in order to decorate "American."
Many of you might not understand the point I am trying to make, but if you stop and think for a while you will understand the cultural and political aspect to this picture. The fact that citizens of the United States call themselves "Americans" causes discomfort for many people living in Central and South America. It might be true that citizens of the United States do not mean to cause any harm when they call their country America, but it is perfectly understandable why people living  in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina, Guatemala etc. might feel offended since they live in the Americas as well. A great example of this that angers many Mexicans is at the border, when the police officers ask people if they are American citizens. Technically, everybody could answer yes as long as they live in a country inside the Americas. To demonstrate this important message, I used the presidents from 4 different countries to represent the "Americans" living in each country.
I do not believe the manipulation is harmful since I am not necessarily attacking the U.S. citizens who refer to themselves as Americans, instead this is just of way to remind all those people that the United States is not the only country in the Americas. Now, I could have manipulated the picture so that it would cause harm to all the U.S. citizens (something I would never do by the way) just like in the article I read called "When Your Eyes Tell You Lies" where it explains how the Soviet Union in the 1950s, used manipulated photographs and propaganda in their favor. The objective was to convince the countries emerging in the war that the United States was strictly imperialist and racist.

Maier, Timothy. "When Your Eyes Tell You Lies." Insight on the News 16.38 (2000). Academic Search Complete. Web. 11 Nov. 2010.

PowerPoint Presentation

My subject was on the Marriott Hotel and overall I think I did a pretty good job. Some of you may be asking yourselves why I chose this topic. Well, as I explained in class, my dream is to become a manager of a high class hotel, and right in front of my house here in San Antonio is supposedly one of the biggest Marriott hotels in the world. Luckily I have actually gotten the chance of walking around the hotel and even spending a day at the hotel's water park. From doing the research I needed in order to do my PowerPoint presentation, I learned that this whole thing started in 1927 when J. Willard opened a 9-stool root beer stand in Washington D.C. He later opened more of these root beer stands all throughout the east coast, naming them Hot Shoppes. In 1956, J.W. Marriott Jr., who worked in these Hot Shoppes during his high school years, joined the company full time and opened the first 365 room Twin Bridges Motor Hotel in Arlington, VA. It is thanks to this man, that there are now over 2,400 hotels all over the world.
One of the things I liked the most about my presentation is how I was able to incorporate certain techniques that Ms. Belisle taught is in class. Now that I really know to do them, I will definitely be able to create awesome PowerPoint presentations for other other classes. Even though I really liked the way I designed my slides, always trying to keep them as professional as possible, I guess I would have also liked to put in more pictures on my slides and maybe even putting in a sort of "elevator type" music all throughout my presentation. That would have been very cool since my topic was on the Marriott Hotel.
The presentation I liked the most from my fellow classmates was that of Tommie's. I just loved how she set up the background music all through her presentation. She was really clear on all of her points she made and I felt like she was kind of training us. Tommie actually gave us important information on how to dress up and how to behave during job interviews. She included a good amount of pictures which made the presentation really appealing.
 Hang's presentation was also very impressive. The one thing I liked the most was definitely her video. I mean I actually felt somewhat inspired after watching it. Hang used many graphics as well and did a great job on the animated effects.

Chris Nolan

Today in class, Chris Nolan provided us with a lot of valuable information focusing mainly on how to use many of Google's awesome features. The most useful thing I learned is how to narrow down the results on Google by using the advanced search option. We can actually specify the language of the articles we are looking for, the file type, the domain and many other things. Professor Nolan also showed us other features like Google books, Google scholar that are very helpful in searching for articles needed for academic work. The piece of information that surprised the most is how Google organizes the list of search results. I used to think that it was only based on the title and how many times the word actually appears in the article, but it also has to do with how frequently the webpage is cited in other sites. By knowing this information I will now be able to find better quality articles on Google and in a much faster way.