Travis’ Blog
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Do we really need that day?

February 17th, 2009 by tschafe

Valentine’s Day. It has passed. It’s over and done. We can all start hating each other again. In all seriousness, though, I do have to question: Why do we need such a day?

The point of Valentine’s Day is that we are supposed to treat our loved ones to a romantic day–A fantastic day of love and enjoyment. We tell our girlfriend: I love you. We give them a gift. My question here is: Why do we need a holiday like this? Shouldn’t we be loving our, well, uh, lover everyday in the same great manner? So many people seem to fall out of the loop of actually enjoying the company and love of their fellow companion that they only seem to remember, “Oh yeah, I like this person” on Valentine’s day. So, in reality, this holiday is rather pointless. We should be committed everyday. We need to love everyday. Valentine’s Day should be everyday. Yet, we don’t do it. Us Americans reserve our joy and love to holidays. The other days: We hate people. We’re miserable–running back and forth to school and the office in a hurry to get places. We get irritated when our lover tries to have a conversation with us.

The point here is that holidays on the whole serve two major purposes: First, it gives us the excuse to “really only enjoy our lives” on those selected days. Secondly, it’s a massive marketing scheme. Companies LOVE holidays. Aside from capitalism at work here, why can’t we enjoy everyday like a holiday? Most will say its impossible, and those are the same kind of people that live miserable, “Oh woe is me” kind of lives on a daily basis. Yeah, let’s NOT enjoy life everyday. (That was sarcasm, by the way).

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b4 IM u got 2 gramer/sppel chek

February 13th, 2009 by tschafe

This aging New York Times article by Jennifer Lee addresses, I guess, a “widespread academic plague” of grammar problems involving using shorthand techniques in student writings. I couldn’t help to find in this article a lot of fire-throwing. Students are like, “You need to get with the times man,” while teachers are beating their students over their heads senselessly with a virtual ruler every five minutes. Of course, our writer here, Lee, makes it all sound incredibly neutral and friendly with her New York Times “I-AM-UNBIASED” journalist persona.

With all the blame laying in this article, there are several key points that must be brought out into the open. I’m here to do that: First of all, students obviously do not fully comprehend that bringing in on-line lingo into the classroom is not necessarily good. In the academic atmosphere, students have to adopt professionalism. Students will not be able to use that style of shorthand in professional setting. There appears to be a lack of understanding on the students part that an exam or paper assignment must be professional. If teachers continue to receive assignments like this, what they really need to do is to have several classroom sessions going over professional vs. informal writing. It’s incredibly apparent that some teachers never really laid down their expectations to students beforehand (I’m looking at you “Ms. Bova”).

Students, you are not free from guilt either. Can you really believe that the term “b4” is as acceptable as the version that’s in the dictionary–“before?” I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous. It’s apparent that when some students are working on papers or exams, they really aren’t trying to do it well if they are “unconsciously” making “you” into “u.” Either the students are not adhering to the instructors notion that “you must proofread” or the instructor failed to teach anything at all about editing. It’s a common quote that “writing is 90% editing.”

There is a very obvious lack of connection between teacher and student, although our New York Times “unbiased” journalist here does point out that teachers are adapting and understanding the situation better now. Yeah, there is nothing wrong with scribbling scriptic code (“l8r, g2g, :), !!!!, #$%@, lol, lmao) in brainstorming activities. If it gets the juices going–do it. What it comes down to, instructors need to illustrate the idea of professionalism, editing, and students need to stop copping out and actually dedicate some time to EDITING.

I think this turned into a rant. Maybe it’s the English major in me. At any rate, g2g: Rant over. LOL! 😛

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The “How to Blog” Blog Response

February 11th, 2009 by tschafe

 

Copyright to whoever made this.

Copyright to whoever made this cartoon.

It looks as though this Farhad Manjoo guy decided to write an article in Slate giving us fellow bloggers some worthy advice. There are some nuggets of goodness here: Probably one of his most valuable key points is the fact that bloggers must post on a regular basis. The blogosphere contains this massive–and I do mean massive–waste land of blogs where the author only wrote maybe two or three posts and then got distracted by a monkey or something. I have been guilty of this.

Also, Manjoo raises a very good point that a blogger needs to arrive at their “thesis” (that’s a scary word, so I’ll use the term “main point” from here on out) in the opening sentence. There must be a main point to every post, and it is true that most readers probably won’t read beyond the first paragraph unless they are incredibly interested. I rarely read past the first couple sentences of many blog posts unless I do find something interesting.

Another valuable point: You probably aren’t going to become famous. Also, if your blog does have potential, it will take a year or so to really get any eyeballs focusing  on your page. That’s just the truth. That’s why there are so many dead blogs. People don’t become famous after lame-post-number-two and simply give up.

This article does give some very practical advice. Other key points do include writing in a conversational style–don’t write like Thomas Hardy. Don’t spend too much time proofing–just get writing. Even if you don’t really gain anything from blogging commercially, you’ll at least have some good practice in writing. That’s another reason to like yourself.

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Because Colin Told Me To

February 9th, 2009 by tschafe

So, on Friday, my instructor, Colin, for this one class I’m taking made us take this quiz on Photoshop. We pretty much had to resize, crop, and post images onto our personal web server (to view my exciting quiz results please visit http://personal.bgsu.edu/~tschafe/tcom264-quiz/). I won’t be modest and say that I did OK because I’ve personally been using Photoshop and the array of other Adobe tools for years now (legally, thank you).

This quiz, in other words, seemed really easy to me, but that doesn’t mean that I severly messed something up. It’s really easy to screw things up when you “think you know what you are doing.” So, there’s a good possibility that when I finished the quiz within five minutes of the class time that I really screwed something up. I guess I’ll find out soon.

Oh, and Colin is also making me write this blog post as an assignment. He also told us to put an image in this post, so here’s a picture of a llama:

This is a llama

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Assignment #6: Basic HTML Commands II

January 30th, 2009 by tschafe

This is an example of basic image embedding:

This is an example of an embedded image with width size in pixels:

This is an example of an embedded image with width size as a percentage:

This is an example of an embedded image with a border:

This is an example of an embedded image that links to the full size image in a new window:

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