My favorite websites

My favortie three were probably Katy's, Rebecca's, and Langston's.  Katy's was very well designed and asthetically pleasing.  Rebecca's had alot of very cool and interesting pictures.  Langston's was the most impressively designed and layed out for sure.  He must know how to use expression web considerably better than I.  My website ended up being a bit off in terms of layout.  I never could quite manage to get it all properly centered like these three did.

Advice

It's pretty simple to get an A in this class theoretically, just do all the work and follow the instructions exactly.

My Website

Please visit my website at www.cs.trinity.edu/~zsickman.  I used Microsoft Expression web to create this website and it was about as difficult and frustrating as I thought it would be.  Any kind of project like this particularly when dealing with software in the Microsoft suite always turns out to be frustrating for me.  The hardest thing for me was getting all the tables and cells and what not for the layout squared away like I wanted.  It took more than a little trial and error and I never could quite get it perfect but I managed to get it pretty darn close.  If I were to have to do this agian I would find a more efficient way to use the formatting tables. the biggest techincal challenge was dealing with these darn tables. This was also the biggest design challenge trying to get this page to look how I wanted.  I may show this site to my geology professors.  I will not be making any more websites any time soon. 

Computers

Larry Hechler came to class today and taught us a thing or two about building computers and doing computer repair and what not.  He made a point of telling us to back up our data on our computers.  If a hard drive crashes it probably is gone. I have kind of been backing up my photos but I really should do more. He backs up roughly every week.  I think I am going to buy an external hard drive. I have been meaning to.  Larry Hechler has been here aound 30 years.  Delll offers a thing called complete care. If anything happens to the laptop Dell will repair or replace it for free. Do not use alcohol ammonia or acetone to clean computers.  A lint free cloth and a bit of water or if that doesn't work a mild detergent are the only safe ways to clean.  The laptop pieces he passed around and we got to look at were very interesting.  I had never seen the individual pieces up close.  He also explained in detail why it is important to to keep your laptop on a flat surface so that the cooling fan can suck in air.  The stuff he said on the battery was interesting as well.  I had always wondered if I should let the battery run all the way down and apparently thats the best thing to do so that the battery doesn't shorten its life.  I just replaced the battery in my macbook this summer actually.  Maybe this new one will last me longer now. I did not know that laptop hard drives are generally interchangable.  Overall this was a very informative talk.

Photos That Lie

I chose for this project to combine two pictures.  I took the picture of the deer at a ranch in South Texas last winter and the picture of the crazy looking fish I used for the head I took probably about 5 years ago down at the coast.  I basically edited the fish's picture so that only the head was left.  I used the magic extractor tool to take the fish out of its picture. Then I had to remove a hook that was sticking out of the corner of its mouth and the ends of a pair of pliers my brother was using to hold the fish when I took the picture. I then decided just how much of the fish's head I want to use and erased the rest of the body.  It was pretty easy because this particular species of fish has this strange almost armor looking plate over its head and the rest of the body is smooth.  I simply deleted the smooth body and was left with the hard armored head.  I decided to leave a couple fins sticking off the head so that they would look like little fin-beards under the deer-fish's head.  I then used the move tool to move the fish's head on to the background of the deer.  I rotated the fish so that it lined up correctly with the antlers and the ears.  I then decided to move the fish's eye down to a more natural looking position so I selected just the eye and moved it down a bit.  I then used the cloning stamp to carry some of the deer's fur down over the fish's head to smooth out the lines between the image and make it look continuous.  Then I had to go in and adjust the saturation, hue, brightness, contrast and shadows of the fishes image to match that of the deer. It was tricky because the image of the fish was taken on a bright summer day and there was a lot of shine off of the fish's head and the deer's picture was taken on an overcast winters day and was much duller.  Luckily the color of the fish and the deer were close enough that it didn't take much adjustment to match them up.  
I manipulated this image this way simply because I thought it would be comical and strange looking.  I don't think this manipulation was harmful at all, just good clean fun.  Im never going to try to pass this new creature off as anything real or try to convince someone the image is unaltered.  The article I read was an interesting one about studying cells from pictures that have been altered.  Sometimes scientists will edit images of cells either intentionally or otherwise to make them easier to see or differentiate.  Often times these scientist do not consider what they may be changing when they do what they think is an improvement.  Changing the saturation or something or an image of a cell may detract from the accuracy of any observations garnered from looking at the photo.  Of course you would never want to studying something biological by looking at a photo edited in the way that mine is but there are certain things that can be done to make important things easier for scientists to see.  They just have to be careful that the manipulation doesn't have any unintended consequences and that anyone else who looks at the photo later knows how and why it has been altered so that they don't see something in it that isn't really there.  


Pinco, Jeffery, et al. "Impact of Digital Image Manipulation in Cytology." Archives of Pathology & Laboratory Medicine 133.1 (2009): 57-61. Print.

Powerpoint Presentations

Overall I was rather satisfied with my presentation.  I felt it went well and that it was reasonably organized and neat looking. I liked the background that I found. I felt that the kind of flowing blue lines went well with the topic of rivers and discharge and what not.  My only real qualm with my presentation was I think it may have been kind of boring.  It was over a reasonably narrow subject that few people ever really need to know about.  It was kind of technical as well and not exactly an add for becoming a G Sci major, unless of course the technically stuff is what interests you.  It wasn't exactly a flashy presentation.  It was really more academic. I think the most interesting thing I got out of this was really seeing how you might go about teaching this stuff. Making the powerpoint I was continually trying to think of the best way to build on each topic so that you had to understand the first slide to really get the next.  I know I didn't really have time to teach the stuff properly nor do I think that anyone in the room cared or wanted me to but it helped me really master the equations and concepts that I was talking about.

Chris Nolan

First and foremost I did not know that google had all of those features.  The basics of image searches and web searches I knew of course but I had never heard of the google scholar function or the define function.  Apparently you can refine your searches to sources that have been deemed scholarly.  Also you can simply type in define then a : and the word and google will give you a definition.  I will definitely be using google instead of dictionary.com after what he told us about the cookies and what not that website installs on your computer.  I also found the lesson in refining your search by using the advanced search feature very helpful.  I like it that you can search only .edu's or .org's