Change of plans?

Well turns out sculpture club doesn't exist anymore.

So i was left without the subject of my web page and progress came to a screeching halt.

I asked if i could make a website for sculpture class instead. The teacher said ok. So after taking some pictures of the room, i headed out the door with a little hope left. I didn't feel as much enthusiasm for sculpture class as i had for sculpture club. I was preparing myself for another half-hearted project when i heard the *rat-ta-ta* *rat-ta-ta* of the snare drum coming from the band room...

"THAT'S IT!" i thought, "I will make a web page for Band!" I had been a practicing member of the group for six years now after all. I walked in and asked the teacher. I got permission and began filling my camera with pictures.

[Fast forward three weeks]

Well now i'm almost done with my jazz band website. I like it, the teacher likes it, good deal.

Peace

My Project

For my "Make a website for someone" project mostly likely will be Sculpture Club.
i don't know how the boss wants his project to look but if he let's me create it, I'll try and make my best site to date. I might even try to put in some type of flash player... (if i ever figure out how).




Captain's log 0001
Now work done yet. Know what the subject will be but have yet to receive orders from headquarters. For now...we wait.

Captain's log out

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Microsoft and Apple: two of the most powerful computer companies in the world. Both companies were created from scratch by two unknown individuals, one from Berkley, and the other from Harvard. Their way to the top has been filled with deceit, strict leadership, and ingenuity. I have been tasked with sending a job application to one of these companies. Who will I work for?

If I had to work for Microsoft or Apple I would work with Microsoft. I don’t know why I would work for either company if money and success were not factors. But if I absolutely have to (which is the case), I would choose Microsoft because of the employee discounts. Since Microsoft technology works the best for gaming and programming, my main two uses for a computer. Microsoft technology is also the most common software around the world, so I would get further use value from it if I ever travel to conventions in Tokyo. If the movie was relatively accurate, I would want to work for Mr. Gates because he was not as mean as Mr. Jobs.

Who are these people?!?!?
I discovered a site today called Wordle (yes i claim the discovery for myself for i descend from Mr. Columbus).

The site takes makes interesting pictures based on the words put in the the space. Whatever words appear most show up the biggest in the picture, like this Myles character. Once you create your picture, you can click the randomize button until you find a style you like.

Whoever made this picture probably pressed ctrl + print screen in order to copy whatever was on his/her screen (probably an enlarged view of the picture they just created). Then he/she most likely went to photoshop and cropped all the stuff besides the picture itself.


Tada, they have a interesting picture!

Showchoir...*sigh*

The last day of the ISAS (Independent Schools Association of the Southwest) is usually slow and it's not unheard of for schools to skip it entirely. This year we couldn't leave early (forgive the font changes....something went horribly wrong while typing this) because we, the choir, had to perform our Showchoir dances at 9:30 in the morning.

Now (yippie it's back to normal...for now) we were in the same time slot as some other big name schools so most of the people who came to our event were not able to make it into their preferred event. So they started off a little irritated to say the least. Mixed Choir went first and they "warmed up" the crowed for us. Then it was our turn.

There was a decent audience: about 30 people came. i could tell by their faces that they were not blown away by the performance of the underclassmen. We started our first number, "Lean on Me"-Glee. We came in with little practice, technical difficulties, and about 1/4 of the cast present and accounted for. I couldn't help but laugh at the very displeased faces i saw out in the crowed. When we finished our first number, i saw the hopeful looks in their eyes, but it wasn't over yet.

Our final song was another Glee song, "Don't Stop Believin' ". The faces grew more displeased at hearing an all-time hit get murdered. I sang loud enough for people to hear me, but i was singing base, and the base part was nowhere near the melody. After a few glares, i decided to switch to the melody. The song finished and the applause were loud and happy as we left the stage.

We made sure to leave out the back and out of sight. I did enjoy the faces though.

Oh well.

Tables

Today in Web Design: Tables


A few days ago actually we learned about tables. No not those tables we eat off of mind you. These tables are more akin to data tables on Excel.

Now I won't post another blog about how to do tables because they are a pretty tricky topic, but I will tell you the uses that make them so great.

1. Tables add some shape to you're bland old website.
2. They organize information with more ease than trying to do it with good ol' &nbsp (makes a space in web writing *not sure about CSS*)
3. They're better than desks!

And there you have it folks. A little on the wonderful world of Tables!

Today In English

Today is pretty much a dead day
I understand why we have to day and what would happen if we got the day off today, but MAN am I bored.

Spring break starts tomorrow. Calculus was slow because our teacher still wanted us to prepare for an exam a few weeks away. Needless to say our focus was elsewhere. Chapel was interesting, the seniors ran it and I was able to hear a piano mini-recital and we sung a song from the Lion King. In English there were only 5 of us (~60 people are off to Mexico today so it's been pretty quite). We watched Michael Jackson in Japan. Our teacher was gushing over his dance moves... I'll admit i was jealous. The concert comprised all of his songs, back to back without any breaks. Impressive. I don't think I could have gotten through the first 3 songs (there were about 20) without passing out on stage. We skipped most of the songs but we got to hear "Wanna Be Startin' Something", "Billie Jean", "Thriller", and "Beat It".

That's pretty much what English was like. It could have been worse *shrug*

My Fault

THE SHAME OF MY WEBSITE!!!!!

The words out on the street! Selym's site isn't perfect!
It looks pretty and there's so much on the page you would most likely pass right over it unless you were perusing the page.

That's right...I mean my Images page. OH WOE IS ME!

During the course of this page's creation, I was in and out of class for other events I had planned. I think i missed about 6 days of the 10 we spent working. Once you get down to the "Links" part of the page, it's glorious. I don't quite know what I'm missing. Every time I get a chance to go back and fix it, I end up tricking out whatever site I'm working on...or I start writing a blog...or I stare into space...

Hopefully I'll be able to focus long enough to make my images section as great as the other ones. until then it remains my Achilles Heel!

Colors pt. 2

Now we are onto the second lesson in colors!
We will be talking about Secondary colors and HSV!

Secondary colors and what you get when you combine the Primary (red, green, and blue) colors.
They included Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow (commonly found in color printers) among others. Secondary colors are not natural computer colors.

Now for HSV!

HSV stands for Hue, Saturation and Value. Also known as the hex-cone color model.
1. Hue represents color.
2. Saturation tells the computer how much grey is in the color space.
A) Common values range from 0-100% but can also be 0-1. (0 is grey and 1 is a primary color.)
3. Value (sometimes called "brightness" in which case the term would be HSB) is the brightness of a color, affected by the saturation.
A) Values also range from 0-100%, 0 being completely black. HSV colors are most often used for high quality computer graphics, like pictures.
An advantage of HSV color is the fact that it is closely related to how humans see color, unlike RGB and CMYK which base their colors off of primary colors.

An there you have it folks! A little knowledge about the colors you see in and around your computers!

P.S. If you get water on one of those old glass computer monitors, you can see the breakdown of primary colors. Pretty neat.

Colors pt. 1

This is an introduction to colors, part 1.
Today we will be talking about RGB and Hexidecimal color representation.

The two kind of go hand in hand.

* The R, G,and B stand for the primary colors of light: Red, Green, and Blue.
*RGB are the natural colors a computer has for showing images.
*Red, green, and blue combine in different ways to reproduce all colors.
*A primary use for RGB is for displaying colors on CRT, LCD, or plasma displays (tv, computer, cameras, etc).
Each pixel has a certain value of red, green, and blue. Those values are changed into intensities and that's what we see.
*Color intensities can be set in multiple ways. No intensity is black, full intensity is white.
Intensity values can range from 0~225, 0.0~1.0, or 0~100% per pixel.
Like so:
(225,0,0) Would be pure red.
(1.0,0.0,0.0) Would be pure red.
(100%,0,0) Would be pure red.

Now for Hexidecimal Colors

Hexadecimal, meaning 6/16, is the most recognized way to display colors on a web page.
To put colors in a web page:
text=/font color= "#000000" (color is an attribute so it needs no brackets.)
The digits are in 3 sets of 2: 00[red],00[green],00[blue] (no commas in finished product)
0 is the lowest value and F is the highest. The range is this: 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,a,b,c,d,e,f
Different combinations produce different colors. All 0's make black, all f's make white.

So ends lesson 1

Burrr *CLAP* *CLAP* it's cold out here!

Well I went to our school's Sadie Hawkins dance for the first time yesterday... I apologized to my date for making her pay for it...

But after that we went to some AFTER PARTIES!!!

Our first stop was to the "official" senior after party. Generally our group avoids these like the plague, but for some reason we ended up there.

Small room. Not many lights.
people out of their right minds.
two by two they walked off into the unknown.

Man were we out of place.

Shortly afterwords we drove back to headquarters to pick up cars and change clothes for a more private party. Our arrival was oblivious to the parentals so we had to stay outside in the backyard. Ordinarilly this would have been great; there's a marvelous forest wonderland with rivers and pools and gravel courts for strange sports. The problem to day was the cold.

Earlier that day the weather had been slightly chilly, but you didn't have to wear a jacket or anything that heavy. But when the sun went down it was freezing again. Our host was lighting the fire pit when we arrived but it provided very little heat unless you were laying dangerously close to it. We ended up sharing a blanket between us.

A little later on, more party guests showed up with FOOD! it didn't last long.

Finally guests were starting to leave and it was just the host and a few others left to huddle together for warmth. I lost feeling in my feet a long time ago but i was in it to win it!

We waited till 2 am and then we helped erase the evidence of a party. We dashed off to the community car and took all the heat from the engine we could.

It was very cold.

Mountain Blade?

NO!!!! It's Mount & BladeA non-liner RPG that a friend of mine introduced me to.

First off------LOVE IT!
Although my laptop can show the graphics correctly, it runs nice and smooth. My desktop handles it fine. We believe the problem lies in my laptop's Dual Core processor verses my desktop's Pentium.

ANY WAY back to the fun stuffs.
First off this game has no real storyline. Think of The Sims and Oblivion combined!
The realism in this game is it's shining point and after a while the old-school graphics will grow on you. The creators of the game made it this way so that it could be easily modable (adding content to the game... really complicated.
After a few trial character creations, I found the one that appealed to me: A horse-back archer!
I named him Rovin because i was lazy but also wanted to stay unique.
I choose the "realistic" save option that autosaves constantly so i can't rewrite history and i set my "damage taken" and "damage done" to normal (they start on easiest) and set the amount of participants in battles to the minimum of 25 maximum at a time. Giving me a difficulty of 88% XD.
I'll keep you posted on my Mount & Blade progress....GEEKS AWAYYYYYYYY!

Feast Your Eyes

On images and how they work.

As a warning: Images are my weakest knowledge pool in Web design thus far.

Pixel is a picture element.
How many are up and down, how many are across.
The more pixels you have the nicer your picture will look!

In a Pixel picture element there are three colors: Red, Green, and Blue.
How much of each color is turned on will determine what color you see.

Inserting Images on Web Pages- Once you got you pictures saved somewhere on your computer, you can upload at will!

Images are not inserted into a web page. The image tag is a LINK to an image file that the browser will display.
To use an image as a background, include this in your body tag:

To put an image onto a page, use the image tag.
< src = "imagename.extension">
This will ONLY work if the image is in the SAME folder as the page. If the image is inside a folder that the page is in, this is the tage:
< src ="foldername/picturename.extension"> <>

Your Mark

Ok now for the topic of logo's: what makes a good one so great?

Lee Newham says that every good logo has these 5 characteristics:

It’s describable

It’s memorable

It’s effective without colour
It’s scalable i.e. works when just an inch in size
It’s relevant to the industry in question

Now let's review a few logos:

First We have

1. This is a simpler logo, but it catches the eye= it's memorable and describable.
2. Now without color this logo loses a lot of its impact= not effective without color.
3. The logo informs you immidiately what the industry is= relevant to the industry.

Next we have (alienware )

1. The logo is a bit more complicated but still easy to describe= memorable and describable.
2. It's the size of logo doesn't affect its message much= works with just an inch in size.
3. If you're not into technology, you might misinterpret the logo= not extremely relevant.

Last we have

1. This logo is the most complicated of the three but the writing helps identify it= memorable
2. The color design makes it relevant and because of the shading, it doesn't need to be in color= relevant and can work without color.
3. Because it has words, the size of the logo matters. If it's too small you can't read it= not scalable in size.

Now if you want to interpret some logos of your own feel free. Here are some examples:




And there you have it folks!

*DOES NOT COMPUTE*

Well that's not true, it does compute...my cell phone that is!

That's not all it does though. It's also a calendar, alarm clock, task manager, memo taker, gaming device, Internet source, music player, tip calculator, voice recorder, timer, and stopwatch, to name a few things.

For school purposes my phone comes in very handy. It's an emergency calculator when i can't find my real one. I set alarms with it so i don't forget important events. my phone receives mass texts from the dean of our grade, informing us of meetings we can't afford to miss. I use the memo tool to write down the days assignments so in case I'm unsure of the day's assignments. I use the calendar function to plan out my assignments so they don't all run together and result in an all-nighter. When homework gets too boring, it's nice to put on some music to keep me awake.

My phone's pretty nifty, even if it's not an iPhone.

Be Careful What You Wish For...

After finishing a long night of homework, our hero looked at the news one more time to make sure there would be school tomorrow. With his fears relieved, the hero picked out his clothes for the next day and went to sleep.

When he woke, he pulled back the blinds in his room. In the darkness he could see that the street was wet and nothing more. To make sure though, our hero detoured from brushing his teeth to turn on the news to see if any schools were closed. To his surprise, many schools surrounding his were closed. As usual, his school was open and ready to go. The hero went back to his daily routine to prepare for the day.

Once the sun came up, the hero saw that his entire neighborhood was covered in a blanket of snow. He had never seen so much snow in person ever before! But school was still in session so our hero convinced his father to drive him to school and they left for the day's grind.

The highways were dangerous. Everyone on the road zoomed down the road at break-neck speeds of 30 to 35 mph. Luckily the HOV lane was open, so our hero got to get school a little faster. He was still late though, arriving at school almost halfway through his first period AP Calculus class. The hero got another lucky break, he had missed the previous days and his math teacher let him take the quiz next week so he didn't have to come to class that day.

Everywhere snowballs zoomed past the hero's head, it was a good thing no one was aiming at him for he was in no mood to try and dodge. All around him he heard teachers and students talked about how much they did not want to be at school. In his 3rd period website design class he saw the email from the principle: school would end at the end of 6th period, later to be revised, for seniors, to the end of 4th period. We finished out website design by taking photos of the snow to upload to our blogs.

The day ended for our hero and, after spending time in a winter wonderland, he went home. He fell asleep on the way and was jolted awake by the car coming to a sudden stop. The car couldn't get up the drive way because there was half a foot of snow in the way. He and his father got out of the car and shoveled a way for the car to get into the garage.

The hero was finally able to rest for the day when the lights flickered. Suddenly the power went out, and it did not come back on. He had to sit in the darkness watching the sun go down with nothing to do, the entire block was out of power. It was about 45 minutes before the power came back on, just before the cold took over the house.

The day ended covered in snow and with blinking power. A good day for our hero!

Spiked or Clawed?

Today I will discuss my two favorite creatures: Hedgehog's and Kittens.
I can't decide which is the best. Hedgehogs are fuzzy and deadly, but kittens are furry and cute.







Sonic the Hedgehog is my favorite superhero
but Garfield is my favorite comic... >.<

What do you think?