Advice

I think Woody Allen said that 80% of life is showing up, so go to class.

And if you have a Mac, I would suggest doing as much work as you can on the library computers (or on any PC) with Windows, just to make things simpler.  

Finally, consider yourself technologically semi-illiterate.  Once you cut through your computer-ego about what you know, need to know, etc., actually learning new or better ways of doing things will be a lot easier.

Favorite Websites

My top three would probably have to be Bianca's, Hannah's and David's.

I thought that Bianca's was very unique and creative. I also love the navbar design and her design in general.
I also thought that Hannah's design was very stylish and creative.  I like the variations in fonts and colors, and overall layout in general.
David Meeske did a really good job of giving an overview of his interests with a good layout.  I also enjoyed all of the the media he included.

Website

My Website

I thought creating my website on Wittgenstein using Expression Web was going to be much harder than it actually was.  And before I knew we were going to be using this progam I envisioned long lines of code, so I was very relieved in the end.  I'm probably most proud of my default page because it is simple and to the point, and most of the design features I wanted to incorporate fell into place fairly well.  I found a good background picture that matched the overall theme, which helped.  I think that this was the biggest design problem that I encountered, because I knew that a plain-colored background with a simple scheme would look redundant, but I also did not want the picture to overshadow the content.  I ended up searching for pictures of Wittgenstein's hometown, Vienna, and one of the first things that popped up was a detail from a glass and iron building there.  It matched my color scheme well and was subtle enough to put in the backgound.  If I could change one thing it would probably be to add more people that Wittgenstein influenced, like Stanley Cavell, W.V.O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, etc. (practically everyone in philosophy, and a lot in other disciplines), so if I have the time to do a little more research (which is looking very unlikely leading up to finals) I might.  I also need to proofread, since I did a lot more writing than I expected to do.  One thing that was simpler to change was that I eleminated the borders on my navbar to make it more streamlined and varied the font size to make it more appealing.  I thought this was as big an improvement as anything.  I'm not really sure who I will show my site to.  I haven't really taken any philosophy classes so far, and reading stuff like Wittgenstein is kind of a hobby.  I'd encourage any fellow students who are curious about Wittgenstein's philosophy to take a look at it, because it's very relevant to many different interests: he wrote about language, aesthetics, religion- you name it.  I'm not sure if I will make another site in the future (maybe for a presentation or something), but if I do at least I now know how.

Hardware Demystified

Larry Hechler was a very interesting guy.  I learned several things that will help me in future maintenance and purchases of computers.  Number one is that from this point on I will be very careful to not mess up anything on my Mac.  The fact that only apple keyboards will work on Macs, and that you have to buy the whole assembly to replace the touchpad, basically means that you're at the mercy of Apple if either of those should become damaged.  Also, I did not know that you could not clean computers with alcohol, ammonia, or bleach.  I figured before that it is probably not a good idea to clean an expensive machine with harsh chemicals, but did not know that, say, bleach causes them to basically melt.  Good to know.  So, I'll probably look into Techspray.  However, the most important thing would probably be to backup everything all the time.  I'm off the network a lot, so I have an external hard drive, but I do not back up as often as I probably should.  Since hearing Mr. Hechler I've been backing up every day, especially since I have end-of-the-semester essays that I definitely do not want to lose.  And as I'm thinking about doing a thesis in English, the whole computer/pool/thesis story scared the crap out of me.  From now on, I'll have anything as important as a thesis backed up either on an external hard drive, a flash drive, a CD-RW, the Y drive, or all of the above.  I probably need to cycle my battery more often also.
Regarding future purchases, I did not know that you can basically put any hard drive into a computer or buy more ram after you purchased it.  I might take those points into consideration later on in purchasing a computer, as it could save me quite a bit of money, I would think.

Powerpoint

I was really interested to see if I could pull together a coherent presentation on semiotics.  It's a subject that has been floating around some of the literary criticism stuff I've been reading.  I first noticed it Paul de Man's work The Resistance to Theory, which talked about the instability of transferring meaning by rhetorical language.  In his mind, rhetoric such as irony or certain tropes are signifiers which are firmly entrenched in the ephemeral realm of social use, and therefore inherently unstable and relative to the signified.  I didn't know at first that this was referencing semiotics until he named it.  I then did some reading around and noticed how many people in academia owe their work to this subject-- philosophers, linguists, cultural anthropologists, mythologists, etc.  And I then found out that it all went back to the French linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who developed a theory of signs that became modern semiotics.  So, in reading some literature on him and some modern usages of the subject, I was able (I hope) to come up with a informational presentation.  I really liked Hannah's presentation on the Bechdel Test.  This was the first time I've heard about it, but it makes sense to analyze movies in this way, with us living in such a male dominated society and all (and movies being one of the main sources of cultural information).  I thought the use of imagery from those movies made it even more effective, especially the "pass/fail" portion.  I also liked Paige's on Sloths.  I just think that sloths are really interesting animals, and her use of information on how to help them combined with the good use of video and pictures made it a very effective and enjoyable presentation.

Photo Manipulation

 

I chose to combine a picture of a pool at Trinity with a picture of someone walking on the beach.  I basically just wanted to make something unusual that would look interesting, so having someone walking on water seemed like an appropriate thing to create.  To make it, I used three layers: the background with the water, the normal unretouched person walking taken from Stock Exchange, and a duplicate image of that person set at an angle to create a reflection.  I mainly focused on manipulating the reflection.  I first dialed down the opacity to give it a blended quality with the water, and then used Liquefy to distort it into something like a reflection.  I then blurred the image to soften the edges a bit.  The last thing I used was the eraser tool to help both overlaid images blend with the background.  It doesn't look that realistic, but in creating it I noticed that it looks kind of like a melted trail that the walker leaves behind, which I thought was cool in its own way.  I wouldn't say that this is harmful because it was done just to create something unreal and absurd, and things that are that far from reality usually aren't too harmful.  Plus, my skills are such that even if I wanted to harm anyone by trying to fool them it probably wouldn't work too well.  I just see it as some absurd, (obviously) fabricated picture of some person walking on water created because I thought it would look nice (or at least strange).

What's interesting is that a picture like this is a much more lowbrow version of the same basic spirit in an art movement: Futurism.  My article looked at the "photodynamism" of Futurist photography in Italy in the early 20th century.  The futurists used photographic manipulation ("dynamism") to "suggest a reality that was different from the one represented" (361).  The earliest form of dynamism started with multiple exposures of motion (hence the name), but this technique was extended into portraiture (361).  Here is an example from the article:

Multiple exposures are used to create the illusion of the subject merging with a cat, which recorded not "a kinetic event, but a varied and differentiated recapturing of a subject almost as if it were possible to render the faceting of the Ego" and therefore gives "a total suggestion of all aspects of the subject represented, variously assumed allegorical, narrative, psychological, or characterological dimensions" (361).  It is obviously a constructed photograph, but it is one not done not out of a wish to fool someone.  Rather it uses its obvious "fakery" to comment on a subject and the surrounding connotations created by such a juxtaposition.

So, in this sort of tradition, I'm definitely not trying to fool anyone.  I guess I could now ask: what are the connotations of a person walking/melting on water in a pool at Trinity?  I have no idea.

Works Cited:

Lista, Giovanni. "Futurist Photography." Art Journal 41.4 (1981): 358-364. Print.