Indecisiveness

Today is our second, or third class working on our Microsoft Publisher assignment. I've come up with my advertising...umm gimmick? I suppose I can call it that. I'm pretty sure I know what course I'm going to go wtih as well, but that's about all I know. I can't seem to come up with a layout that I'll be willing to keep consistent with. The spontaneous quality to most of my planning isn't helping me out much this time, but oh well, I'll think of something.

In other news, I'm actually enjoying using Microsoft Publisher. I haven't played around with the automatically provided templates as of yet but the features for creating your own template are simple to use and not embellished to the point that they are painful. I wasn't aware of this program before and I'm glad to have found out about it. For those formatting perfectionists out there...this is probably a dream come true.

Selling ice to eskimos...

Advertising is an important part of running a business. No matter what service or product your company is providing, it is effort wasted if the consumers don't hear about it. Getting the information to your consumers in an interesting and bold way is the goal of any advertisement. Creative ideas need to be put together, keeping in mind the audience that is being targetted.

Our job is to create an advertisement for any one of our Grade 9 courses using Microsoft Publisher. Microsoft Publisher is part of Microsoft Office but needs to be bought separately from the other programs included in it. It is used predominantly for print documents (i.e. flyers, brochures, newsletters etc) but can be utilized for creating web sites as well.

This will be a good program to add to the ones I already have knowledge of and I hope I will be able to present a convincing advertisement. I'm currently unsure of the course to use for the assignment but I have narrowed it down to two candidates.

Selling a highschool course to students is very much like selling ice to eskimos...and it's time I gained that ability.

Toyota M--- zzzzzz

This hasn't been updated in ages, and I am solely to blame. I will try to make this entry worthwhile enough to make up for the long time it took me to update.

Today was our trip to TMMC (Toyota Motor Manufacturing Canada). The bus ride was approximately one and a half hours there and back. I'm actually bothering to mention this because the trip over there dominated most of our time away from school. The trip was fairly uneventful except for people rebelling against the seating plan and vandalized train compartments.

At TMMC we went around and got to see the different types of processes involved in the manufacturing of a car. Currently TMMC is manufacturing Lexus RX350 and is the only plant in North America/Outside of Japan that has been allowed to do this. The tour was very informative but slightly on the boring side.

Aside from our trip to TMMC we've started learning about the types of businesses. Please refer to my wiki entry on the subject to learn more about it. We're going to be diving into stocks for the next little while, with our 100,000 fictional dollars! We are to choose 5 companies and track them for 6 weeks. We'll find out who gains the most profit at the end.

That's an update of the most recent events...I shall start posting often once more.

HTTP (Hyper Test Torture Protocol)

Well, I've written the test. I've learned a valuable lesson from writing this test and I shall state it here. I am not a person who should write a test in pen, I tend to work better in pencil when I know I can erase my errors. I tend to make more minor errors while using pen and have to cross them out. I think I did a fairly good job on the test, as always there are a few things that I'm not sure I got across in a clear enough fashion but I'll find that out later.

The test reminded me that I'm lacking an explanation about FTP on my blog and I'll take this oppurtunity to talk about it.

FTP (File Transfer Protocol)

FTP is probably the simplest name out of all the protocols we've learned about recently. File transfer protocol has been named accurately and it does exactly what it's called. It transfers files over the internet and it can also be used to upload files onto the internet using a server. This is the most basic way to explain FTP and probably the easiest to understand as well.

That's all for today...I can't seem to come up with much to write about, unusually.

The tags that compose us...

We have our HTML test tomorrow!

Due to this test tomorrow, I'm writing up my entire entry in HTML mode on blogger in order to get some practice. Proof of this is already obvious just by the first line of this post but I'm going to get some more practice.

So starting with text tags...

TESTER TEXT!

If I have succeeded with that you should currently be seeing green text that is in bold and italics.

Now for image tags...I'm using a banner for this but I haven't created it!

Yeah, I haven't created this banner but I strongly support it! Now for some alignment and formatting tags.

Paragraph Spacing

Paragraph Spacing

Paragraph Spacing

Single Spacing/Break
Single Spacing/Break
Single Spacing/Break

Left Alignment
Left Alignment
Left Alignment

That shall be the end of this very strange looking post of mine...

Creative Manipulation...or so they say...

Predictably, we've been given another assignment to work on. This time we're using Adobe Photoshop to manipulate a picture 'creatively'. The pictures we've been given to work with are of teachers we know. Now it' s up to us and our limitless creativity. Of course our creativity is to our liking...which means we've just been handed the faces of our teachers wtih the ability and the order to do whatever we want!

Well...perhaps I've made this sound more like a maniacal plan than an assignment but I can guarantee that those thoughts went through the heads of many of my classmates. We've been asked to be respectful and I suppose that's what we'll do, but it doesn't meen we can't have a little bit of fun.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do as of yet, but there are so many possibilites that I may not limit myself to just one picture. Whether it be comical, disturbing or a piece of art that will change the world...I can't wait to see my final result and those of others as well!

Recently we were assigned a project. We were required to create our own website using Dreamweaver MX that advertised Woodbine. We aren't actually publishing our websites due to limited bandwidth and other technicalities but they need to operate just like a real website from the computer they are saved on.

Today's the day this project is due, and I've luckily managed to finish. It wasn't easy however, there were many problems that had to be solved before I got to my final product. Here I would like to discuss the problems I encountered and how I had to go about solving them.

Navigation: Simple and to the point navigation is key to any successful website. There are many ways you can choose to do your navigation on Dreamweaver but I was set on having a custom header with my navigation links on it. So, once I had created my header I had to slice it up into different sections and link the different parts accordingly.

Resolution: The screen resolution was another problem for me. At home I use a widescreen monitor so the screen resolution is very different from the monitors at school. I had to guess at the screen resolution for the school monitors and build my website according to that. Currently my website works fine on the resolution 800x600 but unfortunately that isn't the resolution for the monitors at school! Well, I've been told that it's okay for now.

Those are two of the main problems I had to deal with and now that I've learned from them, they're sure to help me out in the future when I perform similar tasks.

Touch The Internet

So, go ahead? Touch the internet. What? You don't think you can?

Most people do not consider the internet as an actual physical part of our world but the truth is it's just as physical as the hands I'm using to type up this entry. The first step to understanding this concept is not confusing your broswer with the internet. The internet is a lot of computers connected together in various ways. Your browser is a program like Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox that you can use to browse the internet.

There are many purposes for the internet, more than just the everyday websites you visit. There is FTP (File Transfer Protocol) or VOIP (Voice Over Internet Protocol) and more. The most common use however for the internet is made possible by hyper text which is used in operating the world wide web. Hyper text is text that allows us to link data to other data. Without hyper text nothing else on the world wide web could exist. Hyper text explains the use of the "HTTP" at the beginning of web addresses. HTTP stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol.

That's how hyper text works but creating web pages and creating hyper text is done through using HTML. HTML is the Hyper Text Markup Language. It's a code that is made up of a series of tags that allows us to create, alter and tweak web pages to our liking. Knowledge of HTML is key to creating your own website or publishing your work onto the internet. The thing to remember out HTML is that it is just long lines of text and nothing more until it is translated and displayed properly.

In the past everything had to be done using HTML and typing up long series of tags to complete a webpage but today we have much better tools. An example of our development is the graphical interface we have now instead of just a text-based one before. Our browser translates HTML and displays what the tags are basically commanding the computer to take action as.

Now we have programs that have made creating the actual content easier, just like we've made viewing it much more enjoyable. One of these programs is Macromedia Dreamweaver which automatically creates code for any action you take on a certain area on the screen. Or you can directly create code and the box will display what your code is actually going to look like on a browser. Macromedia Dreamweaver is the most popular program for creating websites and doing HTML related work.

Final Day Of Euphoria

Today is the last day of March Break! Of course we all wish that the break would last a bit longer than it has, but the end was inevitable anyway. I don't have much to talk about that would be curriculum related but my March Break was quite enjoyable. I'll just mention some of the technology-related discoveries and parts of my March Break.

I learned how to create a gif animation with the help of a friend who gave me a crash course in the controls of the Ulead Gif Animator program. I experimented with a few things but my final result came out well and I'm proud of it. I'll be extremely happy to use this newfound knowledge and explore the program more. During this process I also realized that studying Adobe Photoshop is beneficial even if you don't plan to use it often. Being familiar with the tools in Adobe Photoshop can really help you understand tools and operations in other programs as well.

Other than that I have taken a sudden and most probably a short lived interest in pocket PC's. A Pocket PC is basically like a smaller computer, small enough to fit in your hand to be exact. Pocket PC's are continuously being improved and they can do many things that a normal Desktop PC could do. They also can be used as mobile phones in some cases. The functions of a Pocket PC, I have found, are very similar to those of a BlackBerry. However, the Pocket PC is a trademark of Microsoft and the BlackBerry was developped by a Canadian company known as RIM (Research In Motion). They are both classified as a PDA(Personal Digital Assistant).

Close to last, another part of my vacation that involved technology was expanding my knowledge of file extensions. I have listed this close to last as it gave me the most trouble! I had to ask around and even do a little bit of research myself to find out what file formats some files were in. Eventually I realized what they could all do and what program would be used to run them all, but it wasn't easy. It was also quite frustrating since I wasn't feeling very patient when I experienced this problem. At least it worked out in the end.

Now lastly, this is about the dangers of the media which I was very aware of myself near the end of my vacation. You have all probably experienced this, when you go out to a major event where many people with the same interests gather, there are bound to be pictures being taken! Many people will want to take pictures of you, or you might end up in a lot of pictures anyway. You never know what's happening to these pictures! So please always be careful of who takes a picture of you. I'm happy to say we (my sister, me and a few friends) didn't learn our lesson the hard way and steered clear of any media-related dangers on our trip! Now...weather condition related dangers...that's another story.

Well it seems like I've covered a lot of my vacation in this post, just goes to show what a big part technology is of our world!

Graphics Knowledge Exam

Today was the day we wrote our test on "Adobe Photoshop Elements". The test itself was pretty straight forward and I believe if you paid attention in class and did all the work you probably did fine. Even saying that, I'm still nervous about my own mark but that is inevitable. Below are a few things that were either on the test, mentioned in class, or are in some other way significant and related to our work on Photoshop Elements.

Aspects:
-Resolution: This is the pixel to inch ratio, or how many dots per inch are in your image. 300 for print images, 72 for internet purposes
-Canvas Size: This refers to the width and height of your canvas, the most common print size is 4 x 6 (inches).
-Hexadecimal Codes: The values used to represent all of the 16.7 million hues available to work with.

Tools:
-Marquee Tool: Either retangular or elliptical, used for selection.
-Paintbrush: Used to paint directly on to the canvas with varying brush sizes.
-Lasso: Freeform selection tool.
-Dodge/Burn: Used to darken or lighten an image, name comes from actual chemical processes that were used in the past.
-Sharpen/Blur: Used to blur or sharpen an image.
-Crop: Cut or clip your image to the desired part and discard the rest of the image.
-Gradient: Used to spread from the background colour to the foreground colour. (Acheives a faded effect with one colour blending into the next.)
-Smudge: Does exactly what it's called, smudges.
-Eraser: Again, no brainer, erases.
-Clone Stamp: Clones from a source. Takes one part of an image and duplicates to another part of the image.
-Horizontal/Vertical Type Tool: Adds text either flowing horizontally or vertically to the image.
-Eyedropper: Selects a colour in the image and sets it to the foreground colour. Handy when identifying or narrowing down colours in an image.
-Magic Wand: Used to select parts of a picture, determined by the hexadecimal code fo a colour and controlled by the tolerance setting.

Palettes:
-Layers: Displays all your layers, their visibility and all the effects that have been applied to them.
-Navigator: Shows you an overview of your picture, the percentage your viewing it at and allows you to move around the image.
-History: Records and shows you previous actions that have been taken.
-Layer Styles: Lists and allows you to apply the different layer styles available.
-Swatches: Shows you different basic colours you can use.
-File Browser: Allows you to navigate through your files and open them.