Wednesday 9 April 2008

Easter Hols

Hello and Welcome back, well over the holidays I didnt get up to much, slept alot and lazed around. Did the usual stuff, played football and went to the golf course for a game of pitch and put. Alot of my mates were also back from university so we were out most nights at the pub or in town. Had 3 weeks off work because it was closed so was a bit skint towards the end of the holidays but it was all worth it. Good to catch up with some mates and other than that was rather quiet.

Wednesday 12 March 2008

Random blog of the day

This is my random block about using your mobile phone in class. This feirce debate was sparked when a student was using his phone while in a leture. Should it be allowed? who knows, but if your bored or waiting on a phone call then it may be inevitable. Students probably believe it should be allowed whereas lecturer's may disagree, I personal dont really care.

Wednesday 27 February 2008

Windows movie maker...

Today we played around with windows movie maker which is basically a very basic movie editing program. It allows you to drop movies / pictures onto the storyboard and then add effects and music to the movie.

Tuesday 26 February 2008

Facebook applications

This week`s blog is on face book applications well I don’t really use face book, made an account just for this, so I don’t know too much about the applications but here goes:

The main one I see my mates using is the Petrol heads application, it is a little game in which you pick a starting car and proceed to race other face book users who have this application. To start you compare cars and then if you want to race them you click the race button whoever wins the race will win points, you can have ten races a day, so make sure you are going to win. Other people can race you and that is another way to get points which build up and eventually when you have enough points you can get another car. There are many levels of cars and each increase in level requires more points, so obviously the best cars cost the most points. Everyone’s goal is too get the best car but it also shows statistics like how many wins and loses you have had so you can compare to your friends to see who is the best, which makes it very addictive.

Another one that looked fun was the super wall which is a popular Face book application that puts videos, audio, pictures and Flash embeds on the Face book wall. The super wall was developed by RockYou and there are 2.5M active users and 100,000 new users per day. That might be to due to the fact that it aggressively tries to invite your friends to use your wall, making it hard to opt out. This application may soon be obsolete though because it required that the wall was replaced by a new one and Face book has just added the ability for developers to put rich media on the original wall itself.

Some others that I have heard of that sound like good fun, listed in the order I would have them:

1. Top Friends. Flatter your best mates by putting them in your Top Friends box and insult all your others by leaving them out.
2. Beers. Buy virtual beers for friends. Not as much fun as buying real beers in the real world, but better for your waistline.
3. What's Your Stripper Name? – If you ever want a career change.
4. Poker. Play Texas Hold'em with virtual money against other Face book users.
5. Graffiti. Let your mates scribble all over your profile.
6. Super Poke! Like the poke feature except a few more actions.
7. Games. A decent collection of online games playable via Face book. Be warned, this will waste hours of your day.
8. Console Identities. Display your Xbox Live Gamer tag, PlayStation Network ID, or Wii Friend Code on your profile. Cool.
9. Zombies, it's actually fun infecting people. Lol
10. Moods. Splatter emoticons on your profile to show whether you're sad, grumpy or joyful.

What makes a good face book application? Well the main feature has to be its interaction between hundreds of users, the ability to be used by anyone visiting the site and the fun appeal of the application. It needs to be addictive and have a goal for the user to achieve.

Anyway hope you enjoy reading that wall of text. :)


Wednesday 20 February 2008

Videos

This week was movie week, everyone went out and made videos with the theme of super heroes. Tom was the super heroe Supercrip, and the video demonstrated the powers he possesed by fighting off gavin and liam, saving the slightly gay muggie, dean. Although he could not bring himself to love him. The sequal will surely star rob the evil leper man.

Wednesday 13 February 2008

Photoshop ethics

Today we discussed the ethics of digital photographs e.g. making models and such look better and taking people out of photographs.

The photo shopped images are being used to deceive people and gain more money for the big company's as sex sells basically, also the photos are getting harder to tell if they are real or fake and maybe being used in court as evidence.

It is also possible to add people to a photograph which could prove where they were and who they were with this will lead to photos not being recognised as proof and they will lose their integrity.

There are some people who describe photo shopping as a new form of art but not all photographs are labeled as photo shopped. Here are some made by me. :)


Wednesday 6 February 2008

Took some pictures

Today we went out and took some pictures of uni life, walked around a bit taking pictures of anything and everything, cars, buildings, pubs, takeaways and even a giant fluorescent pink sick from the night before. Now thats student life. lol

Using robs super expensive camera we documented many waterholes :) and then went to liams flat for a game of darts and a game of COD4 on the 360, pff consoles.

Carl