Thursday, June 26, 2008

Final Day

Well, it's the final day of class, and judgment has come. I've made all my revisions and hope that my materials meet all the criteria for an A. This class has been informative and I have enjoyed Dr. Wang's instruction...too bad we didn't get to have class in the dark when the power went out. Thanks Dr. Wang for a wonderful semester!

Monday, June 23, 2008

Coming to a Close

Coming up to the end of class here this week and we're uncovering new material...Now comes the challenge: finding all the stuff I've submitted and getting it all together on a CD. I really appreciate Dr. Wang's efforts to give us feedback on our assignments so we can better understand what we're doing (and get a better grade)...So, I've got to go back in a make sure I've made the recommended changes before I put the projects on the CD. Good stuff.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Word to Powerpoint

Well, if I had known the simple bit of information we learned today, it would have saved me lots of unnecessary typing and toil. We learned to transfer an outline in Word to slideshow form in Powerpoint. Like I said, would've been great to know while preparing my undergraduate seminars...I just find it frustrating typing everything directly into Powerpoint. This lets you collect all of your information in Word and just press a button; BAM...its a slideshow. Dang.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Happy Fun Presentations

Today we are presenting our student powerpoints and the computers are being quite slow, so I figured I'd blog it up a little...As I just finished my undergrad last year, Powerpoint and I have already established quite the relationship. I chose to design all of my Physics seminars using Powerpoint, so I already know a good bit about it. By no means does that mean that it gives me no problems...I run into little annoying problems like trying to change the text in several slides to a specific color...of course transfering video is always a problem because of referencing...but, it still gets the job done. Good stuff...good stuff...

Thursday, June 5, 2008

Excel

Well, today was Microsoft Excel Day. I really never knew how much you could do with Excel...I have done all my lab work (as far as data is concerned) with Excel, but there is so much else you can do with the program. The new things that I learned today were how to make everything look good asthetically. I'm pretty good about entering data, but being a physics guy, I'm not neat. I'm not asthetically pleasing. Excel makes it pretty easy. Crazy stuff.

Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Microsoft Word

Today we learned about the wonders of Microsoft Word...The new version is pretty complete and has just about anything one could possibly want to use to construct a word document. It seems like this version has more stuff than even Bill Gates needs himself. It's nice to know how to do these things...Inserting a "Table of Contents" can literally be done in like 30 seconds as long as you're consistent with your headings. That detail and many more just make this program loaded with features that make your work look professional as well as saving loads of time.

Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Second Day

Today we basically learned about the history of computers as well as the conceptual makeup of computers. We learned about bytes, bits, and the binary system that builds the memory of a computer. We also discussed the short-term as well as permanent memory of the modern-day computers (RAM, hard drive, ROM, etc...) Good stuff.

Monday, June 2, 2008

First Blog


Creating a blog was a whole lot easier than it seemed to me. I already had a "gmail" account, so I used that account name and password and the instructions were simple enough to be blogging in less than a minute (Literally). I'm still not quite sure how to post pictures and images, but I'm sure it's not that hard. It seems blogging, creating accounts, BlazerNet, etc. are all simply dependent on being consistent with identification of the items, names, email addresses, etc. that you are referencing. If your referencing is incorrect, then you will find a dead end (which is what I did with my BlazerID email, disabling me to access UAB email and even register for classes!...all because I didn't reference correctly) All in all, it was quite an easy and informative experience.