Visit Latin Dances

Just in case you missed the link to my webpage here it is: Bailes Latinos Please don't forget to post your comments. : ) Enjoy your Holidays!

My Knowledge from IDD 250

For all IDD Majors, this class is essential not only because it is required but mostly because it is a class the teaches you how to write for your website. This class had to do with the amount of Interactivity one can provide when creating a website, it is important to make it interactive for the viewers to enjoy visiting your website. This semester as you might have read in the beginning of my blogs, we had to write our thoughts and questions at least once a week, either from the material that we had to read which was Dreamweaver MX 2004 and Pause & Effect. Dreamweaver was great I learned a lot from it, and the CD was helpful. Pause & Effect was about Narrative and Interactivity, Narratives are everywhere it's a story. And Interactivity takes place everyday of our lives it could be with our family, friends, or even machines! Yes, we are often interactive with machines, take an ATM machine for example it provides us with menus so that we can reach what we want, withdraw a certain amount and if so how much or from where, checking or savings? This is one of many Interactive experiences. Games are also well-known to be interactive.
We also did a research on the web for “Are Prehistoric Japanese Underwater Pyramids real?” and how not all the information we find on the internet is the most accurate or true. Some websites believed it was true and they made you believe it and others were against it but no matter what opinion you had initially started with, when doing the research you had second thoughts if it was real or not, because the creators of those websites issued you information that would lead you to believe what they believe.
I also learned a lot from the coverage we had to do in the debates, this was an enormous interactive experience because while President Bush and Senator Kerry where debating thousands of people where watching and Blogging at the same time. We had to create a website on the debate and who we would vote for, we had to provide links to different news sites and blog sites that would support our thoughts and ideas about the debate and who we believed won.
It was also exciting to be beta testers of your game Multi Matrix and how important it is to have a fresh pair of eyes look at your work and see if it works and is it easy to navigate through. Everybody's opinion was important and in providing feedback to the creator it gives an insight on what other people see and like.
Creating our websites was our final project and it had to be Interactive, fun and educational, before doing this we had to come up with a mind map and figure out the layout for my site, this made it easier to create. It is very important to remember when creating a website that it needs to be interactive for the viewer, that it needs to be easy to navigate through and this is what I leaned in IDD 250.

Input on classmates

I haven't been able to comment on everybody's blogs, most of them don't have links to the websites but from what I've seen in class everybody is doing a great job! I know that its been difficult for those students who are taken both IDD 161 now but if it's any consolation even though I took IDD 161 I still have some trouble with it. Creating the webpage layouts in Photoshop has been a new experience for me (that also includes creating my own icons in Illustrator) I feel that I haven't been thought all the steps, I have mostly learned from mistakes or from classmates showing me how to do whatever I'm having trouble on. Thank you Brad for all your help this semester, I have learned quite a lot from you teaching class. And thanks Mike for helping me with my Music files for my site.

Flu?

The flu is trying to take over me, but I'm almost done with my project I just CAN'T let this stop me from completing this semester with all my work done. I'm doing some changes to my site that hopefully they will be for the best I will have to upload it in the morning because I can't from home.

My Website

My web pages are not all finished this is just to view what I have for now. Some links are up and running and others are still under construction.
Click here and enjoy what I have so far. This is the FINAL LINK to my Web Page! Please visit it and make some comments. Bailes Latinos

Bailes Latinos

I have shown my family and some friends what I have done up to now, and they like it (so far) but they were not really able to comment because it is not done, I need to insert the music and video files and I'm not sure how to even start!

Happy Thanksgiving!

I have been very busy during my break, I have been trying to finish my website but at the same time I very proudly anounce that I am an AUNT! It's so exciting, I'm very happy! : ) Welcome home Kaitlyn MariCarly Guaman

Frames

I'm having a hard time working with frames, and I was going to work on my website and all the images are missing!

Dance website

The dance website will consist of several latin dances and it will have trivia, videos, music, basic steps and a quiz. I'm not sure if the layout I'm using is the best way to go, hopefully it works! : )

Dreamweaver Chapter 17 & 18

This week I read about Templates and Library items and how this helps the Web designers to make pages that look consistent and updating changes throughtout a site is also easier. Templates in Action and creating a new template the examples on the Dreamweaver book makes it easier to understand, when you create a template and you need to make a change to the page and all of the other pages as well, it makes it easier to just change one page and then Dreamweaver will update all of the pages. The library items are indicated by the color yellow. Creating and Modifying a library item is also very simple with Dreamweaver. In chapter 18 they described what Accessibility means making your Web pages accessible to everyone. On this chapter they also gave the links for Accessibility Guidelines you should visit them.

Election : (

"Your vote can make a difference" Yes, that is really true... but what happens when you are not sure if your vote went through correctly? Voting was an Interactive experience today in the United States. In Florida they expected to cast ballots using ATM-style touch screen voting machines that some computer scientists have criticized for their potential for software glitches, hacking and malfunctioning. other states use different polling devices, like the lumbering lever machines and others punch cards. And in one polling location in Mauldin, S.C., they were forced to use paper ballots because of equipment troubles. Another typical problem is when a voter went to a polling place and found there wasn't any record of their registration or even the people who don't know where they have to vote. I watch and read the news in English and Spanish in many sites the information is the same but when I watch the news in Spanish of course what is mostly discussed is about the Spanish community and they informed the community of the equipment that is being used in order to vote. Also I found out that they bring "observers" to see how we vote here in the US, the invitation was given by "sociedad civil" meaning the civil society, however these international voters don't have access to everything that goes around. In another show very well known is "Sabado Gigante" and in this show Don Fransisco interviewed both President Bush and Senator Kerry. First he interviewed Senator Kerry and he spoke about what he will do for the Spanish community from Health care to children to Education possibilities for immigrants. And how to help immigrants become legal citizens, and when President Bush was interviewed he only mentioned given crop workers the opportunity to come here to the with a “Temporary Visa” just to do the jobs that the Americans don’t want to do. He said he wants to help them with their “American Dream” but he is not helping if he just allows Mexicans to come to this country temporary, the American Dream for many South and Central American countries is to buy a house in the U.S. and to live freely. The coverage during this election was very similar to any other , except for the blogging part that has become very popular in which it’s possible that while your reading someone else’s blog you see things differently and even want to change your vote from who you thought was the one you thought would be a better president for our country. Visiting different websites can also make you think twice about your decision. Waiting for the winner was very hard because they were both very close Univision and CNN were very careful and patient in not calling the winner until the 270 Electoral votes were announced, I’m very sad that Senator Kerry did not win this Election, mostly because we are stuck with President Bush and this war that I just wish was over with.

Dreamweaver Chapter 15 & 16

Inserting Fireworks MX 2004 Images into Dreamweaver, I actually have never used Fireworks but as I was reading it seems very easy to insert firework images and I could also edit the images that were built in Fireworks because it has built-in editing tools. You could also insert simple rollovers these two programs were made to work together very easily. In Fireworks MX 2004, there are settings that control the type and amount of compression your graphics will receive. On the next chapter they went over Automation and they started by explaining that it is easier to use the History panel instead of the undo/redo option witch you would have to do multiple times. I wasn’t aware that Dreamweaver had the Find and Replace feature, I have used this feature with Microsoft word, so it was great to find out the Dreamweaver has it too! I enjoy taking pictures and as a gift I received a really COOL Digital camera that I love which means that in order for me to share all the pictures that I have I could use the “Create Web Photo Album” command which lets me quickly create a small Web site-based catalog of images. Dreamweaver also has other commands available but some of them require very strong JavaScript knowledge.

Multi Matrix

The interface design is great, I like the colors that were used and I like the way the logo on MultiMatrix is set up it uses the that negative space and looks really good. I think this game is in the correct age group Ages 10 and up. Something that I noticed was that the help icon is a rollover icon, which is great and a new page appears showing the instructions. However I think the font is too small it is difficult to read without getting really close to the screen well at least for me it was. While I was playing one of the advanced games I also noticed that in the "Standard" Color option the number 2 and the number 5 are both blue, I'm not sure if that's there to kind-off confuse the player. If that isn't the case then it might be a good idea to change the color on either number 2 or 5. Out of 15 games I played I wasn't able to reach the highest score or better yet the lowest score in order to become a winner. It wasn’t difficult to navigate it would be great if students in middle school can play with this game. This game would be good to have on a cell phone, that way the player could play anywhere and anytime and it’s educational at the same time. It would also be a good idea to sell it on CD the price point for a game like this might be $10 to $15 if they had a variety of other games. The reason to sell it on CD is because for the people who have dial up connection it takes a long time to load and this way they can have easier access to the game. Also having it available online makes it easier for everyone else to use. Overall this game is great because it’s educational even though it's easy to find the pattern to it, so making it more complicated would be fun but enough that they can actually win and get credit for it by displaying their names on the winners board.

Dreamweaver 13 & 14

Chapter 13 in Dreamweaver covered Forms, and this is one of the things I haven't used in Dreamweaver just yet, so it was interesting to read about it I'm planning on creating a Form for my project. When using this feature you can also create forms inside tables. To create a jump menu which is a different type of form that is mostly used when you don't have a lot of space in your screen. Chapter 14 covered Behaviors which are a lot of cool things, such as open a browser in a smaller window. One of the great things you can do with behaviors is create a Set Text Field which allows the user to interact with the form you have created given the user only the set text options. Another of the cool and sometimes annoying feature you can put in your web site is opening a new browser window. Validating Forms is very important as well in order to optain the correct information from the user.

Dreamweaver Chapter 11 & 12

Ok, I think my mind map is finally ready. The reading for this week was great, In Dreamweaver Chapter 11 I went over Rollovers I'm already familiar with this and Dreamweaver makes it so easy to do and it's a really nice effect to have on a webpage. Chapter 12 XHTML I learned that XHTML is HTML that follows XML syntax rules. An element: is a tag or set of tags that help define content and structure within a document. A tag: is the actual tag within an element. Attributes: are made of an attribute name and an attribute value. Another cool feature that I discovered by reading this chapter was that there is what is called The Code Validator, and that way that this can be accessed is by choosing... File>Check Page> Validate Markup. Dreamweaver also has another useful command called "Clean Up XHTML" it automatically removed empty tags, redundant nested tags, non-Dreamweaver MX 2004 XHTML comments.

Miami Debate

Today's Debate is going to take place at 9:00pm and weather you are interested or not most off the channels will be canceling your favorite show to watch the debate. Since it's now a homework assignment I watched it so Click here and find out what you missed out on. : )

Yet again another TEST!!

OK, I've been trying to fix it and have not had any success!!

HCI

Human Computer Interaction has come a long way according to this article A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology from basic interactions for example when manipulating with a pointing device like the Sketchpad. "Sketchpad supported the manipulation of objects using a light-pen, including grabbing objects, moving them, changing size and using contraints. It contained the seeds of myriad important interface ideas." Another pointing device is the mouse which was developed at Stanford Research Laboratory in 1965, the mouse was made famous as a practical input device by Xerox PARC in the 70's. The Application Types that are in this article are the Drawing programs, Text Editing, Spreadsheets, HyperText, Computer Aided Design and Video Games. Brad A. Myers also explains in his article about the "Up-and Coming Areas" in which I wasn't aware that they had already begun to take place as early as 1966 like the 3-D and the Gesture Recognition, Multi-Media, and many more. Human Computer Interaction is going to keep growing as time goes by and little do we know if our lives will some day be like the movie I,ROBOT?

Got Links?

Great! I got the links to work and one image for now, I'll work on it more tomorrow! Bye-Bye

Are Prehistoric Japanese Underwater Pyramids real?

Hmmm, it makes you wonder?

I believe that the underwater pyramids at Yonaguni are man-made!

The truth is up to you, do you really believe these prehistoric Pyramids are "natural" or were they "man-made"? According to this link where Mr. Kimura, a professor from the University of the Ryukyus comments that the Pyramids in Okinawa are real.

http://members.tripod.com/underwater_Pyramids

This is a great website... http://www.unknowncountry.com/news/?id=540 where they report that the Japanese Pyramids were really manmade, and that the tools that where used have been found in the area this site also has great pictures.


If that wasn't enough for you try this link where you can see pictures of the "Underwater Pyramids"

http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/phikent/japan/japan2.html


The following link takes you to The Morien Institute where they have been following up with the discoveries of the underwater pyramids

http://www.morien-institute.org/yonaguni.html

Great l.a.Eyeworks examples

I've been doing the examples on the l.a.Eyeworks and it definately helps to do hands on. Being able to use tables in Dreamweaver really makes life easier. I remember having to design web pages with HTML code and how long it would take me I used to loath creating tables that utilize a lot of time as well. However, it's really great that I learned that skill first because it helps me understand it when ever I need to see the code in Dreamweaver and fix something to the way I want it, Dreamweaver gives the option of what layout one wants to work in. Dreamweaver is the best! On a different note, about the mindmap it's coming out pretty cool, I just wonder if I choose a good topic? Ohhh and I still can't seem to be able to log on to my webspace!

Chapter 4, 5, & 6

So... I had a great weekend! Thank you for asking! LOL! Ok so that's not what you really want to know about. My thoughts about what I read in Dreamweaver MX 2004 Chapters 4 through 6 and my thoughts about reading Pause and Effect. Chapter four was Basics and it was still review, I guess because of IDD 161 it made it easier as well as Chapter five which was about linking what I did find was that one can use a placeholder to represent that a content will be used. Chapter six covered most of the aspects of Typography (this semester I'm also taking Typographic Design). In Pause & Effect I learned about visual perspective. On a different note I tried logging into my web space and I was not successful, I hope to work it out tomorrow in class.

Chapters 1, 2 & 3

I have read the first three chapters as well as the introduction. I decided to read the whole book regardless if I already knew the material. Chapter 1 basically introduced Dreamweaver and how it works. That HTML and XHTML is very much the same except for a couple differences which I wasn't aware of, so it was interesting to read. However there were some things that were repetitious because I had already learned in my previous course. Chapter 2 was a tour of all the different buttons and bars, and Chapter 3 was also very important because I try to organize my files when creating a web space and there are times when I forget to and it does get complicated, therefore I'm going to try to follow the correct format when managing the files. More blogging to come later!

Preliminary for Blogging

Hello Everyone

I am really looking forward to this semester. I would like to learn a lot about Lit & Writing for Interactive Art (IDD 250). Using blogger is new to me but I'm excited to find out what it's all about. I'm not really sure if I'll like it because I don't like writing to much, but I'll make the best out of it. : )