Final Exam

So here it is the end of the road. I feel like I did a decent job on my Photoshop creation.I was unclear about the directions when I started however. The directions said I could use a few selected images and gave the example a picture of myself. So I wasn't sure if I could use pictures off the internet. I decided not to in order to be safe. I feel like It would be difficult to improve but if somebody else looked at it they could probably find some flaws. The website doesn't exist to my knowledge by the way.

Glogster

Angry Birds & Star Wars?

Well apparently they are coming out with a Angry Birds star wars game. Not being a mobile gamer I care not for Angry Birds but I do enjoy Star Wars games ever since playing Super Star Wars on the SNES. I feel this is a terrible idea as I don't enjoy Angry Birds. It doesn't interest me, a strategy gamer, at all.

Cyber Bullying

Cyber bullying is the act of bullying people on the Internet. A psa I saw about cyber bullying said that there are legal consequences with cyber bullying. I believe that this violates the first amendment. How can somebody have freedom of speech if they need to be careful not to offend anyone? The answer is that you don't have freedom of speech if you need to be careful not to offend anyone. Cyber bullying will always happen and limiting peoples' rights will not fix the problem.

Pic Monkey

This is a photo of myself created on Pic Monkey. Very strange site as I found that most things that could edit your picture needed to be paid for. That wasn't great but I think I did a good job. Not the best photo editing software. I prefer Photoshop to this any day.

Here is my photo. Can you tell what shouldn't be there?

Voter Turnout

I feel that the low voter turnout is fine. If people don't care enough to vote I don't think they should be voting in the first place. It can be a few hours of waiting in certain areas but whoever is elected is going to be in office for at least two years so it's worth the time to vote. I don't think people should be trying to increase voter turnout so that there will be uninformed voters. Uninformed voters don't help anything and should not vote for any reason.

Strange Photoshop

Not the best thing I have done in Photoshop but I feel I did OK. Not quite as abstact as I would have liked. Darius as you can see has been turned into somewhat of a ghost. Very haunted Photo. The skull next to myself I think is pretty good but I wanted to blur it a bit more than I did. Overall not bad.
Picture:

Zombie

So Halloween is coming up tomorrow so I had some fun in Photoshop. After watching Thriller for the thousandth time I turned into a zombie. Very unfortunate as I have very serous skin problems now. Not the hardest thing I've done in Photoshop but I found it fairly enjoyable.
Photo of myself:

Photo Story

So I made a rather interesting Photo Story based mostly around The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time, a game released in 1998 and is considered one of the best games ever made. All the music I chose is from the game. I found it difficult to chose which music to include because I love all the music in the game but I feel like I got the best parts. All of the pictures I chose somewhat fit with the areas that the music is encountered in the game. For example there are pictures of trees for Lost Woods and rain for Song of Storms. I feel like it came out OK although I only have eleven or twelve pictures because I found it difficult to find good, relevant, public domain photographs.

Video:

Social Media

I believe that the affect of social media on presidential elections is most profound on sites such as Reddit and YouTube  This is because lots of people go on these sites and lots of information is being dropped on the masses. People frequently talk politics on these sites which I feel makes them influence the elections far more than Facebook or Twitter. Twitter is greatly deceiving because most of the political candidates followers aren't  real people (http://gawker.com/58269600). I personally don't think Facebook is as politically focused as Reddit and YouTube because Facebook has an entirely different purpose.

Color Replacement in Photoshop

Using the color replacement tool in Photoshop was fun and interesting.
The first picture I did was of a barn. First I made a copy. Then desaturated it. Then I did a mask of the sky which I realized would not work do to the sky's color. So I recolored all of the clouds then did the entire sky. I think it came out ok. I did do a little bit of cropping.

Before:

 After:

Then I decided to change the uniforms of the union in a civil war picture. This was much easier.
Before:

After:

Overall I found the color replacement tool to be very useful and fun but a bit challenging. I unfortunately spent so much time on the barn that I didn't have enough time to finish a third picture.

ZooBurst

Link to My ZooBurst:
http://www.zooburst.com/book/zb04_506b09afe4470

I very much disliked ZooBurst. The main issue with ZooBurst in the user interface. It's not clear what all the buttons do. For instance the pop time and pop delay buttons are confusing. I set them the same on two different pictures and they came up at separate times. I also found it very difficult to select the pictures themselves. Whenever I clicked on them it seemed like pure chance weather or not It will register the click. This can sometimes cause you to mess stuff up when trying to select something which do to the complete lack of an undo button can be very frustrating.  It feels weird changing things and in order to see your ZooBurst for checking purposes you need to exit and then go back in to view it. To get back you need to back out again and then go back to the editing. Very time consuming and annoying for no good reason. They couldn't just put a button to view it? To top it all of the end product isn't very impressive. To be fair my book was pretty bad but it's very confusing and difficult to pull anything off without a lot of practice. I will never use this website again unless forced to in the future. I believe storybird was vastly superior because you could focus on making the story rather than fighting the website.

QR Codes

I don't see the point in QR codes to be honest. It's like the people who put them up assume that everybody can read them while in reality only a very small minority of people can actually make use of them. I believe that a bar code works just as well.
However I still made a list of 5 QR codes:
Wikipedia

Google

Yahoo

Flickr

Steam

I like most of these websites however I don't use Flickr but on the rarest of occasions. Was fairly easy to do but still disagree with it's usefullness.



Elements of Design Prezi

The finished Prezi my group came up with. Pretty good but nobody in my group wanted to be in any of the pictures leaving me the only person visable in many of the pictures. Here is the link: http://prezi.com/dnk0gedlmbmw/edit/?auth_key=7c4umzg&follow=qiniookiazvd

I Phone 5

What's the big deal about the I Phone 5? A good question with a diverse range of answers. People in my opinion do no need to buy a slightly improved product at full price every year. The usefulness of this product also needs to be called to question. One could buy almost any other type of phone for cheaper so what does this I Phone bring to the table? Very little at best but when looked at from the viewpoint as a mobile phone, which it is, it is actually a bad choice. It's bigger than most mobile phones which is excusable but the main drawback is there are no actually buttons to call people with. On a normal phone you pick it up and dial numbers and there you go calling someone. On the I Phone 5 you need to press a button to get the numbers which slows one down considerably. The idea of paying somebody a 1000 dollars to skip in a line to receive this product is ludicrous.

Places I've Lived

I have not lived in many differnt places in my life but I have lived in a few. My first house that I lived in was around SMW. I wasn't right next to it but I was fairly close. When I was around four or five I moved into the SMN area. I lived there until the beginning of seventh grade when I moved to my current home still in the SMN area. I very much enjoy my current home but I did enjoy the second one better for various reasons including the layout of the building.

Lemonade Stand Game

I play the lemonade stand game and I found it had more depth than I anticipated. I found it fairly easy but mistakes I made early in the game held me back considerably. Changing prices with the weather is probably my key to success. I would most likey do better if I played again.

Final Screen:

Spider-man and RoboCop

A pretty cool photo I created in Photoshop of Spider-man and RoboCop patrolling the streets of whatever city they happen to be in. I didn't make any sweeping changes to the photo but I did make some minor adjustments.

The first thing that I did was change the brightness and the contrast to make it a bit more lively than it originality was. After that I started adding things like the movie playing is now "Finding Nemo" rather than another movie that wasn't as fishy. I then decided that the lamppost needed a hero to guard it so I put Spider-man on top of it. I personally feel that was the best job I did on the photo. If you look really hard next to the large building you will see a man falling down. Unfortunately for him Spider-man is looking the other   way and RoboCop has no way to save him. Speaking of RoboCop he was the final addition to the photo and I feel like he came out fine. The way he is standing does like strange though.

Overall Photoshop is useful and was enjoyable to work with other than trying to cut out the people from their original photos. I think there is far more yet to learn about Photoshop but I think it is a good software.

By the way here is the original photo to compare:

Raccoon Mania!!!

Two really nice raccoon pictures both made on bighugelabs.com. I like how the Extreme double poster came out but the movie poster didn't come out so well. If you noticed the movie is written, directed, and is starring John Wayne. I couldn't find a way to crop the movie poster but It works to an extent.

A Day Without Technology Pixton Comic

Pretty simple Pixton comic. Depicts a man hunting for food because without technology he needs a source of food. Fairly difficult to create considering the annoying controls that Pixton operates with. I believe that it accurately represents my vision of what I wanted it to be like. I was disappointed  however that is is very difficult to see the facial expressions on the first two panels. I think  their point gets across successfully however. The main problem that I faced though was whenever I zoomed in to work on expressions it centered around that character and when I zoomed back out it cut off a large section of the work I had just done and their was no way that I could find to fix it without starting over. Not to mention whenever I tried to click on something there was a good chance that I would grab the background and mess it up.

In the first panel I discovered how difficult it is to show someone throwing an object in Pixton. The final result, which is the best I could do, makes it seem likes he's walking towards the bird and causally tossing a spear at best. The second panel took a while but I think it came out decently. The main problem was the zooming in issue. By comparison the third panel was easy and it took me all of five minutes. I am slightly disappointed in that I can't make the bird look like it is actually being held by the man but I find it acceptable. The fourth panel was also fairly simple apart from changing the feathers colors and naturally the zooming in problem. Surprisingly though the background moving was the hardest part of the forth panel.

So in summary the comic is fine but it is far from perfect due to the annoying problems with zooming in and out along with background issues. I found Pixton fun but I doubt that I will return to it unless it makes major interface changes.    

Ninja Raccoon

Ninja raccoon about to take on James Bond. I think the winner is clear. Nature's Ninjas will easily defeat the weak human. NINJA RACCOON ATTACK!!!

Social Learning

Social learning is the idea that students can collaborate together either in person or, more recently, on the internet. Social learning is also called peer to peer and includes things like online resources and online instruction. Social learning also has been seen as an opportunity to create a place where students can help and teach each other. The idea of social learning has been gaining steam recently due to the increasing accessibility of the internet and it seems that it will become bigger in the upcoming years.

Tagxedo Check Mark

I really nice check mark I made on Tagxedo. Full of western stars and Grimith.Liked how John Wayne's name lined up.

Wordle Design

Great Wordle that I created that shows things that I like. Mainly westerns and video games.

The Good and Bad of Facebook

I believe that Facebook is bad overall. It is simply a giant corporation that makes billions of dollars from ads as well as millions more from their uninteresting "games". They are currently hurting the gaming industry buy filling it with low quality games that, while are called free, try to take peoples money at all times. Facebook also allows people to stay in touch with old friends. While this may seem good it actually keeps people in the past and prevents them from going on to different friends. Facebook is only a source of problems for individual people and humanity in general.

Here's a link to my Prezi: http://prezi.com/7h92znjhsp8i/walter-wright/

Summer Reflection

Looking back my summer was fairly average overall. The best part of the summer was the first part of it when I was still in the going to school mode. After awhile however that initial excitement wore off and it became normal. I did however spend a week in Branson, Missouri. It was also fairly uneventful but the change in scenery was nice. Near the end however I needed to change my computers video card which was a pain but it needed to be done. That was most everything I did other than hanging out with my friends which was fairly entertaining.