My podcast reflection

So this week we did podcasts not my favorite thing. I hate listening to the sound of my own voice for starters as well as having other people hear how dumb I sound. Two of the things that I have hated all my life. Second so many topics to choose from it makes it harder to choose a good one I spent days trying to come up with a topic that I knew enough about to not sound stupid talking for 3 plus minuets. Third and most important the program that I used to make my pod cast was not user friendly as I kept making mistakes with one word and always towards the end I would mess it up and have to start all over at the beginning.

In the beginning of class I was so afraid of the weekly blogs because I always thought that everyone was laughing at me when they were reading my blog but I got over that because as far as I knew only class members were reading them. That all changed after I did my ToonDoo review and got a comment on it by one of the co-founders then I got scared again. But I can tell you that it's gone for good now that I have a podcast out there with my voice on it. I am not sure if I will ever do anything outside of class with podcasts until I feel more comfortable with my thought being out there for others to hear.

All in all I learned a lot through this project and enjoy pushing my boundaries. If I had it to do again I would have used a different program as the one I used really was not working well for me could not get the picture to load and on three occasions my saved audio file diapered causing me to have to rerecord it.

Podcast

Episode 1

Nick Hawkins' Podcast

Enclosed please find my podcast. This was a challenging assignment as for starters I hate talking on the computer or in general. second I had a bunch of problems loading it had to do it about 10 times the picture would not load up the audio kept disapering but I got it enough now. Hope you enjoyed it.

Podcast review

Here is the Podcast that I chose for my review. It was called Scottish History Devolution.It is a really great Podcast if you are looking for information on Scottish History not as good if you were looking for a Podcast on fashion but I think the title of the Podcast will keep that in check. I have to say that the history lesson that I listened to was really informative as well as factual. I found myself wanting to go and listen to the other (or first) Podcast. The only complaint that I had was the two interchanging pictures on the Podcast were a bit boring, as well as the fade techniques used to switch between the two pictures were distracting from the audio. I greatly enjoyed the fact that the audio was done by a Scotsman as that led more towards the authenticity of the piece. All in all it was a very good well thought out and informatively educational piece. If you are interested in Scottish history you should listen to it as well.

The worlds best salsa?

How To Make The Best Salsa

View more presentations from Dean Bush.

Ok I know the slide show did not show here, but right above the picture part is a link to the original web page with the right slide show. I chose this one for an obvious reason it was an ok slide show. It showed a good relation of positive and negative space not so overpowering just the right amount of color the the black of the words and the white of the background. The tomato shot gives a great example of depth into the picture for instance. I also noticed a good combination of warm and cool colors to give each picture a nice rounded balance to them. That also could be contributed to the fact that most of the pictures included Complementary colors. Now this could have been made better some of the text is not correct and the directions are a bit vague as well as the fact that I can tell you that the title is a bit of a stretch as I have had hundreds of salsas and that particular recipe is not in my opinion the worlds best, or even something that most people would even be able to eat. As it for most people would be way to hot.

Photo Composition

So the first three photos I love because they show a different point of view looking up from below. The picture are unique as they a side of plants people don't typically look at.




These next three show an extremely simplified background by blurring the background you are forced to look at what I want you to see and not get lost in the background.



These two photos for me showed a full frame also a bit of contrast the cloud one was one of my favorites(I did change the saturation a bit to make the clouds better).


This photo was one that I loved because of the lines on the dandelion pull you towards the center. Leading lines to be exact.




These three showed the rule of thirds.



These two show contrast with the colorful fireworks on the black night sky.

These last five show leading lines and They also create great depth as you follow the lines to the horizon.

This was what I was going for

UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok I found a program or more effectively an online editor that allowed me to take a picture for my first idea and make it a reality. The program was called Pixlr. Although very time consuming it is a easy process first you upload your picture to the site next you make an identical layer of the picture on top of the original picture then you desaturate the color from the top picture. Easy so far now it gets tedious you zoom in real close and using the eraser you erase the black and white parts that you want to show the color from the photo from layer one. Basically you are erasing one picture to see the picture below it. I will say it was the longest two hours of picture editing I have ever done.

To edit or not to edit what is the question?

Ok so here is my original picture it is off a purple prince pepper plant it is a very unique plant as the most of the leaves and all the peppers are a black/purple color. My original idea was to make a black and white picture and have only the peppers be in color but I was not having any luck as a beginner so I went the what you see because I liked how the peppers pop right off of the plant.

This is me edited picture this was not what I was aiming for in my head but in the end it came out really well. I tried making a plan and then following my general idea but that did not work at all. So after a few minuets of random effects that I was smart enough to write down I made this and liked it much better than the original idea that I had. Alright back to the begging here is the list of all the edits I made to the picture. Fill light up to 3/4, highlights up to 1/2 shadows up to 1/2, color temp down to 1/3, saturation up to full, sharpen up to full, soft focus raised size up to 3/4 and amount up to full, and finally I raised the tint up to full. It was really fun playing with this picture and now I am going to see if I can find a program that will allow me to edit this into the original idea that I had.

UPDATE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok I found a program or more effectively an online editor that allowed me to take a picture for my first idea and make it a reality. The program was called Pixlr. Although very time consuming it is a easy process first you upload your picture to the site next you make an identical layer of the picture on top of the original picture then you desaturate the color from the top picture. Easy so far now it gets tedious you zoom in real close and using the eraser you erase the black and white parts that you want to show the color from the photo from layer one. Basically you are erasing one picture to see the picture below it. I will say it was the longest two hours of picture editing I have ever done.

Firefox Review

So you came here to see a screencast about Firefox well as of right now my older than dirt computer is going to see to that not happening. So I am going to write about it and later hopefully in the morning go up to the school and do a screencast. I will comment on a few things now that I plan on talking about later and they are a few of the features that I liked. One of them is the tab feature it quickly allows you to have multiple taps open at the same time. Also there are many add-ons that one can add to Firefox to increase there internet browsing experience. There have been 1,504,004,322 add-ons downloaded. there are also currently 146,512,324 add-ons in use right now. This just goes to show that is a widely used program that people like.

Here is a link to the Firefox program. Some of the new updates include faster surfing using less memory, private browsing, and my personal favorite session restore which after an unexpected shut down allows you to go back to what you were last doing.

Firefox 3.5 the latest updated version is said to be 10 times fast then version two in fact the say that what once took 18,148 ms with version two now takes 1,524 ms with this newest version 3.5. This if correct is a difference in speed of just over 16.5 ms and in the day and age we are in now everyone wants it faster and faster. Providing no more major hurdles I will try to get my screencast up and on the site before the end of the business day tomorrow. Until next time or next week which ever gets here first.

My Adventures With ToonDoo

Here is a screen shot of the login page.


Here is a screen shot of the home page at ToonDoo.


Here is a screen shot halfway through my first comic strip.


Here is a screen shot of the last part of editing my comic.


And here is a shot of the final comic in it viewing format.

So I had the task of reviewing the wonderful world of online comic strip creation know as ToonDoo. This application is a way to make an online comic strip that is another fun way of expressing your feelings and thoughts. It was extremely easy to use and makes for a very neat application.

Some of the features that I liked from this application was the fact that even though I could not draw myself out of a wet paper bag I was still able to make a very neat comic using all of the already loaded images. Another thing that I loved was the fact that you can make it public or private by being private you can share only with the people you want to see it. One thing that I did not like was the fact that you are in a matter of speaking limited to the images that you can choose from. Now I suppose that I might have missed something but from what I read they have a limited supply of images.

This was an application that I would love to spend more time with an may even use it outside of this class it was so simple to use that I never even had to look for the directions I just signed up for an account and went right into making my first comic strip. Top notch product that is both just as fun as it could be educational. Here is a link to my finished comic a little play on the reaches of Social Networking.