3/15/14 Final Blog Post =[

Hello everyone,

This is going to be the last blog post of this course and I got some few things I’d like to say. When I was looking for a class to fulfill the Area A2 writing requirement, I thought it was going to be one of those boring writing classes which I dreaded every single day when I went to that class. I always hated when the professor makes participation in class mandatory because that requires you to raise your hand and either ask questions or answer questions every single class period which puts a tremendous amount of strain on a shy person like me. I am not that kind of student that participates when I am forced to do so. Also, pop quizzes… oh my gosh how I hated pop quizzes on readings that are so dry and boring. So I would like to thank Professor Dean that he didn’t force people to participate in class nor did he give us any pop quizzes. He also gave us interesting readings to read which made the class more fun. I really enjoyed this class and I cannot have said this to any classes that I have taken so far and believe, as a fifth year, I’ve taken a lot of courses. This class has been a real blast and a blessing because the things I picked up from this course can be carried throughout my life.

This blog group was a very interesting and new idea and it gave us more of an understanding or experience of how multimedia work. I never would have thought a writing class would allow us to learn how to use photoshop, prezi, strip generator, gliffy, screen cast o matic, and audacity. These tools I will definitely carry on in the future whether if it’s teaching someone about health and fitness or teaching someone how to play a video game that I’m interested in. It’s been fun reading all of my fellow group’s blogs and responses. Also I enjoyed watching your prezi presentation whether its intern sushi or making a magazine cover using photoshop or even cooking salmon. Again, it was a fun and interesting experience and I cannot be more grateful that I actually had the opportunity to take this class with Professor Dean.

P.S. to Professor Dean

It really made me happy that you appreciated and acknowledged my work especially with the photoshop project. As a person who grew up with no acknowledgment of my works, it really made me glad that you’re the first professor/teacher to actually recognize my work and proudly asks if you can present it to other people (which by the power in me, use my works for future students). Again, I gladly thank you for teaching me things about multimedia and also encouraging me to keep going and putting my talents to use. 

Food For Thought...

If you had all the resources you needed and all the money you need to plan one special day for the person you like or your significant other, what would it be? Let your imagination flow and maybe someday you can make it happen if he/she is worth every second of your life.

Screencast Reflection on Prezi Project (3/7/14)

Prezi Research (02/28/14)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4txS9cGoqU

This link is my project for Prezi that includes something interesting, why it's important, and research tied around my Prezi. This relates to multimedia writing because in a way, i am advertising a product that makes a difference in a person's life with backed up sources written in scientific journals and books. This is relevant to Writing 105M  because it includes the work done with screencast o-matic, strip generator, audacity, photoshop, and much more which is listed in the description of the video. Why I thought this subject was interesting? Well because for one, I am lactose intolerant and I am also a very poor college student. I do not want to spend money on over priced half gallon lactose free milk when there is a better alternative. Since this has worked for me in many ways; I thought why not share it with the rest of the world since a lot of people are lactose intolerant. Knowledge is important but to be able to understand that knowledge comes wisdom; and with that wisdom I brought you a technique that may end your suffering when you deal with those one gallon lactose milk.

Screencast Reflection on Photoshop Project (2/21/14)

Food for Thought...

If you were a business person and owns a company and found out that you can replace your work force with robots which saves you a net $100,000 a year; will you do it? Consider the following, there are no downsides with robots (like breaking down or taking over the world or functioning on their own). However, replacing your work force will require you to fire most of your employees and knowing that these employees will go bankrupt and homeless if you decide to fire them. Now the answer is obvious isn't it? But wait, that extra $100,000 that you'll be earning is going towards your new legs. You've been crippled your entire life and always wished that you could walk, play basketball, run, not get stared at like you're an outcast, being normal... It's your dream to walk for the very first time and be normal. What is your decision?

No Network Media 2/14/14

No network media... piece of cake! No phone? no problem, i don't get calls or texts anyway. No networking? no problem, i barely have any friends. No internet? hmm that's a tough one but challenge accepted. So here it goes; the day without internet or social networking...

I woke up this morning thinking to myself, no computer or phone basically no technology past the 1900s. I thought it was a piece of cake but the first hour went by and it was the longest hour I have ever experienced. I sat there on my bed just thinking, all sorts of idea and imagination coming into my mind, flooding my brain endlessly as i cannot shake these images off. One idea led to another like staring out my window and I saw this bird. Next question in my head, which direction is it flying to? Where is it going? how long will it fly? will it land someone? When will it eat... one question lead to another and the topic suddenly changed to why is the grass so green? Then further analysis went along saying the a photosynthetic pigment called chlorophyll is the reason why the grass is green. Then i started thinking about the process in which plants take light energy and convert it to oxygen and glucose. Then it just keeps going on for the next hour or two until i decided I should just go out and exercise. So i went to the gym, done some crazy amount of workout but then only another hour has past by. Now that i depleted all my energy i should eat and probably do some unfinished projects or homework. After doing my homework, I just sat there again bored out of my mind. This day made me realize how much I miss my computer and my games and online social interactions. But with every challenge that always come to me, i will always try and beat it. Thats the kind of person I am. So now i decided i will do something that i have never done before when i was bored. It was .... read a book.. for fun... That's something that I've never ever considered doing. Sure i read articles for fun but books are entirely different. After reading a few pages of the book, i got really bored and realized this is why i don't read books. So i just sat there again just staring out my window just thinking what to do next. Then I got tired of thinking and took a nap.

After I woke from my nap, i went and just played basketball for a while. After that, its time to go to work. Never have i been excited to go to work before! It made me appreciate human to human contact so much more when i went to work since i get very little of it. Most of my conversations are usually just online chatting but this human to human contact... my my what an interesting trait. Anyway after work it was already 10pm, its time to go to bed so that i can sleep away this painful misery of not having my games and computer.

At first i thought this was an easy assignment.. but nooooo i couldn't be so wrong. This assignment really shows how people or how I relied on social media and computers in order to past the time. Back in the days when we were kids, there wasn't such thing as a high speed internet or a very good computer.. Nope.. no one actually owned a computer when I was a kid. But that didn't stop us kids from having fun... we would adventure, play tag, handball, basketball, etc all sorts of games that we don't even do now. My my, how technology has made us so fragile that we cannot even come up with stuff that is fun anymore because we have computers giving us simple options to do.

Photoshop Project Thoughts (2/7/14)

Wooooooooooo, another week another blog... 5 more weeks to go! yay! alrighty lets get down to business. Photoshop is a great tool. I used it before a long time ago and learning to use it again was a lot easier than learning it the first time. However, I think the drawback in using photoshop is that its a complicated program to use. Like if you wanted to reflect or invert an image and do more stuff to it, photoshop has a much more complicated way in incorporating that into its program OR maybe its just me... But i think simple programs like Paint allow me to do things much quicker if i just wanted to add a quick change here or there and just save and bam done while in photoshop i have to click more stuff and edit more things in order to accomplish the same goal as i would do in paint. Of course photoshop is great for bigger projects like the one i currently finished with my name using the environment of ucsb and such. The photo is located down below:

Look at that master piece... my my it took my hours to do but i got it! First my process in thinking about how to go about doing this project was first the GOAL. What was my goal when i was asked to find a letter outside of class and make it resemble something. Then I was like psh that's easy why not choose more letters.. OH I GOT IT MY NAME! Thats a challenege muahahah as i thought in my head. Then I successfully found all the pieces of my name and i was like HMM this is very good but how am i going to go about putting these things together without making it messy. So I tried piecing them together without cropping or setting a background and i was like this is very messy. I need to polish it so i found a background of UCSB storke tower and I was like hmmm THIS IS MY THEME! Timothy at UCSB! Who is Timothy? What does he do? How'd he get his name?? Interesting story on how i got my name but I will discuss it in my final piece =D so too bad you gotta wait!. So anyway after thinking about putting these things together and cropping things in and out, then I wondered wait... there's water in this photo! I SHOULD DO A REFLECTION OF THOSE LETTERS! YAY! EXCITING! Then a few more hours of my time went on trying to figure out how to transparent these letters at the same time rotate them like they were reflecting. It was hard to try to get the right angle and stuff and even so its not perfect but at least i tried AM I RIGHT? Can't go through life if you arent going to give it your best shot RIGHT? So as i came to look at my final piece i asked myself this question... Can my audience recognize these letters as something i found around my environment? I always worry if people cannot recognize these objects because that would defeat the purpose of the assignment. BUT hopefully you can recognize some of the letters; but of course if i showed you guys the raw images of these letters you'll be like ooooo that's crafty! bahaha just kidding. Anyway, that's my way of thinking about this assignment! See you guys in the next blog!

McCloud Reading (1/31/14)

I'm choosing to write about McCloud and his notion of icons because the things that he describes about icons and how pictures come together aren't really well thought out by audiences who just read words and move on without paying attention what is actually there. For example, McCloud drew himself very plain and not very sophistacted so that the focus remains in his texts and not his picture. As a reader, McCloud really nailed the focus on text part instead of himself by adding less detailed to his avatar. Most readers won't even take into consideration that McCloud purposely made himself look so very plain so that he can deliver his message. To be more clear, what i am trying to say, is that the writer must truly understand his audience before getting his message across. So lets elaborate on what I mean by this and how McCloud see things. McCloud is a writer who notices what a reader wants to read while I am a reader who reads what McCloud is writing.

Hahaha I bet i just lost you there... okay let me put more examples to try to get my point across. McCloud is trying to deliver his lesson through text by using comically drawn icons to deliver it. People like pictures and like following a constant flow leading from one image to another and will be more willing to read text if there is a picture there even if that picture is totally useless and not informative. He drew himself a couple of times with different emotes but it only had him in the drawing a couple of times but with different words placed on the picture. Now as a reader, the text he puts in his image were short and concise which didn't scare me and I mind as well read it since the picture takes up more room than the text. If McCloud were to draw himself smaller than the text, I might have just not read it and just skimmed it because I would feel too lazy to read all that text. That would destroy what McCloud wanted and he wouldn't have accomplished his mission in getting his point across.

In addition, McCloud did not focus in details when he was drawing out icons, especially himself. He showed us a face that look a lot more detailed and explained how our attention will be drawn to his detailed face instead of his lesson. He was right with that because I noticed if the detailed is so great, I just wanted to look at the pictures and move on without reading any texts which isn't what McCloud was focusing on.

Therefore, I realized that McCloud uses simple font and images with texts to get his point across by understanding his audience and how they would react.

Food For Thought....
If the world was faced with a massive threat like an asteroid heading towards earth which would wipe out all life on earth, do you think we can set aside all the differences we have with other countries and combine our brightest minds to develop a plan to avoid such problem? Will we be able to stay United as one world? If that did happened, do you think the world will be a better place since every countries are allies? Will our technology far surpass anything that we created since all the money that went to war is now going into science and development which leads to new irrigation or food culture or making the environment a better place with more advance solar technology?

Audacity and Sound (1/24/14)

Oh my, looks like I already discussed audacity for last week blog... Hmmmm OH, i'll just tell you guys the new things i was able to learn in audacity. For example, amplifying the sound by using the effect -> amplify keys. This made it so easy to hear my voice with a not so good mic. It can also lower the volume of the recording which is helpful when you want to overlay music over your talking/podcast. I also learned how to increase the speed of my voice making me sound like a chickmunk which is pretty awesome. This would go very well if i wanted to make a recording that is purely for entertainment or maybe i can sing with the chickmunk voice and not feel embarrassed cause that's not my real voice! bahahaha good ol audacity...

Let see.... audio tied to text.. what does that mean? What does that mean... I'm going to interpret as this; audio and text are related to each other due to what is going on in your head. Let me elaborate, when you read a paragraph of text, what is the voice you are using it when you read it? That voice that you're reading it with in your head is also the voice that you would use when u record yourself reading that text. So that's how i see audio and text being related. If you still don't understand what i'm saying lets say you read something like "the cat went meow"; did you or did you not make that meow sound like a cat?? I know you did because that's how audio and text are coming together.. its a natural thing!

how is audio not tied to text.. hmmm good quesiton... how is it not tied to text.... hmmmm let me think... still thinking... uhm.... I think i got it.... audio isn't text in a way that you are not able to know the tone of the text while when a person first says a word you are able to know what he is feeling. For example, read this outloud..."There is a cat in the tree".... did you read that normally? Well if you did you are wrong because the last few words were going to be "said the man in a very loud voice". Now you know that the sentence that you just read was actually a shout and making us know that the cat is in danger. BUT now if I were to just say "There is a cat in the tree" just using my voice; you will definitely know straight up that the cat is in danger without knowing the next sentence or phrase that will come out of my mouth as if u were reading a text. If you are still confused by what I mean uhmm oh wells you just gotta live with it hahaha..

Food For Thought
If you were asked to survive for 30 days on an a mysterious island like the movie Cast Away by Tom Hanks, but instead of having nothing, you get to pick 3 things; anything u want that will help you survive those 30 days; What will those 3 things be? (Note: if you decide to pick a human being to be your companion think about how you are going to provide for yourself as well as for that companion... things could go chaotic and you guys end up eating each other :O!)

Engaging Response (1/17/14)

I have learned something very interesting in the past two weeks. The program that I am most fond of was screencast-o-matic. However, the assignment was discuss about the readings and videos that I have read/watched. I really enjoy learning how to use the Audacity from watching a couple of videos online. It is a very neat program and it comes in handy when I am recording gaming type videos while having myself talk as well as inserting a song in the background. There is a link below on what I did with the screencast-o-matic as well as combining that with Audacity to show what I have created with these two simple programs. (I did use something more advance to polish everything but the concept of putting audio and video together remains the same). How my writing process differs depending on the tools and technology I used for this kind of writing is a question I do not understand lol. However, I can say that my reactions to these programs was like this

And then after learning those programs I was like this

And as promised here's the work I did with those programs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUgFru6FZqw; This video is 5 mins long and contains content you might not understand but the voice over and music over starts kicking in the beginning and you'll see that I was able to combine footages and audio into one video. Enjoy!

Food For thought...

If you had a choice to be immortal; to be someone who just cannot die, to experience all the new technology that human can come up with, to read every article, to study all subjects, to be able to travel in space without space suits or protective gear, to explore the universe and try to find other higher life forms... Would you do it? 

Short Biography

Hello there, my name is Tim. I am a 5th year undergraduate student majoring in Biochemistry. Aside from spending all my time studying metabolic pathways and doing experiments, I also work at UCSB Residential Dining Services for a minimum of 12 hours a week. As for my hobbies, I enjoy running, working out, playing basketball, playing video games, and thinking of what if questions. I take great pride in myself that I have not consumed any alcoholic beverages and will not plan on doing so.

I am currently taking Writing 105M because my biochemistry major requires us to know how to edit and format pictures as well as making short videos so that we can reach out to a bigger audience when proposing a research plan or writing a grant proposal.

I have made countless of videos and edited many photos because I am also a gamer. So I have some idea on how to make a video using either window video maker or using something more advance like adobe premier pro. I also have an idea on how to edit photos using photoshop as well. What I wish to gain from this class is to understand more programs that are out there that can be even easier to use for smaller projects.

A little word of wisdom the next time you do something that goes against your morals

What makes a person great is not one who has a lot of money or knowledge, but the fact that the person is able to resist temptation and never give up on what he/she believes in.

Food for thought....

If you had the power to go back in time once and relive everything from that point on, where would you go and what would you change (granting you that you have all the knowledge you posses right now)? Will you meet the same people again even though they could have hurt you in ways such as love or would you choose a different path like studying harder and going to another college, erasing all the bonds you had with all the friends you met at UCSB?