P Starr’s Crib

This past Wednesday, October 13th 2010, the Graduate Student Association (GSA) was received by President and Mrs. Starr at their home, the Allbritton House, in the heart of the Baylor Campus. All GSA Program Representatives and Alternates were invited to this event. There were food and drinks provided, but the thing that impressed us the most was the warm welcoming reception of both of our hosts. President Starr and Mrs. Starr are known for their warmth and they couldn’t have been nicer to us. Among the guests were Dr. Lyon (Dean of the Graduate School), Dr. Jackson (VP for Student Life), Dr. Scott (associate vice president for Student Life), and Dr. Scales (Associate Dean of Graduate and Professional Studies and GSA Advisor).

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To Blog or To Blog…not even a question…

How long has it been since I have posted something here? A while right? However it is not like I haven’t been thinking about bloggable subjects. Even this post has been drafted a while ago…i just have not posted it. Surprisingly, the though of blogging about a subject has been in my mind A LOT, I see/read something and the first thought is: “I should blog about that,” but I end up not doing it. It is not like I don’t have the time. Technically speaking I do have more time since I am done with my classes and now I am “only” working on my dissertation proposal, but still…blogging seems to be such a cumbersome activity…Especially since I have recently adopted twitter for how convenient it is (I tweet from my phone often and I am almost breaking the 1,000 tweet mark). However, I have been thinking a lot about the benefits of blogging. For instance, I now don’t have to write any more papers for class (for grade), I am not required to read any more books so what am I going to do with myself if not force myself to write something that is thoughtful and meaningful? I can’t tweet that! So blogging is the way! From now on (and I know this should have started a while ago) I will reflect about my dissertation readings, fun readings, and other fun mind growing activities that I partake on a regular basis. I will also be fully redoing this blog site, and by that I mean that my online identity will be completely be overhauled. I plan on combining both my portfolio website with my blog, and adding other pages, and all of those will be located at the domain that I already own: addysdesigns.com. This might be a lot of work, and maybe this will only be up by next year, but I am very excited about it.

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NMC Summer Pre Conference Workshops

It was a beautiful day in Anaheim, CA. Even though I decided to commute and had to drive about 45 minutes to get to the Disneyland resort – where the conference is being held – the drive was great and being able to see the amazing CA scenery was priceless. I was looking forward to today’s pre-conference sessions since they would be a good hands-on opportunity to learn some video-editing skills.  I arrived at the Disneyland resort around 8 o’clock, paid the $14 for parking and headed to the registration desk. There I got all my fancy NMC tags (all stainless steelish – including the program) and usb hubs, t-shirts, and shannanigans. Then I headed to breakfast where I had the pleasure of meeting some delightful people from France and Portugal that work for HP and also Beth, that is as the programmer/Second Life master extraordinaire for NMC. I was very excited to find out that she was the one that programmed the SecondLife NMC free t-shirts that I have downloaded for my Addy Braveheart avatar (thanks Beth). After a short break I perused through the wonderful Disneyland hotel and could not NOT smile to the amount of Mickey Mouses that surrounded me It was surreal, yet pleasureful. I then found the room where I spend 3 hours of my morning working with the wonderful FinalCutPro software. Tom Wolsky was the presenter and Beth Corwin from the Digital Media Academy was assisting him and they did an AMAZING job on teaching us in 3 hours the basics of a software that takes a lot more than 3 hours to be proficient at. I learned several shortcuts and tricks that would take me YEARS to figure out. During our lunch break we headed outside to the garden area where an amazing lunch was set up by the palm trees and I had the pleasure of seating by Beth once again and Harvard’s Paul W., which motivated me to play with the token powered boats, but since I was out of cash I had to conform to going back to another 3 hours session on video editing. This time around, however, I was using iMovie and indeed I learned how to edit like a pro with this session. Video editing projects will certainly happen more frequently in my near future. In fact, I have gathered footage of my first day of adventures and pretty soon a little video will be added here to illustrate my day (even though I have JUST noticed that my footage is as shaky as the Blair Witch Project‘s, so grab a bucket before watching the entire video). I should say thought that FinalCut is a great tool for video editing, but iMovie is so easy (just like any other apple software) that I recommend for use if you are a teacher, or if you would like yous students to create a video editing project). Later on we joined the other NMC attendees presence to partake in the Corporate Partner Showcase and Opening Reception which had great food and live music and where prizes were drawn out (of course I didn’t win anything…my Mojo was totally stolen from me by a couple of people that came near my table hahahha). I was a very fruitful and productive day, and soon you will be able to witness some of the techniques that I have learned from the little video that I will post. Ok…I was going to stop blogging here…but what happened when I got to my friend’s apartment complex is worth publishing out to the ‘world’ lol…So, I drive the 45 to my Jo’s house, I park the car, and go towards the area that I remembered I walked from when I left to the conference. I look at the doors, they all look the same. Then I decided to GO FOR IT! I was wrong…lol…and totally broke in to the wrooooong apartment. I noticed pretty fast, however, turned around and decided to look again at her address (saved in my amazing iPhone – and YES I said amazing…the iPhone IS amazing! hahahah) and found the correct apartment, from which I write this blog post…and from where it is time to go to bed until tomorrow where I will be attending some conference sessions and blogging about them. Until then…SIC’EM LATER

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Amazing website

Check out this amazing website: http://producten.hema.nl/ and admire the powers of flash animation!!!

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Have you ever Googled “GOOGLE?

Isn’t that an interesting question? Today, the election day, i was at work wondering around the web when I decided to Google some information about typography. Interestingly, the logo at the google site was dressed up for the ocasion: I wondered then how amazing would it be to work for a company like that. A while ago I saw a documentary about google and saw that inside their building they had toys, couches…it was basically a grown up perfect playground…I wanted to revisit that so I GOOGLED GOOGLE! hahha…The question just came in my mind: How many times do you ever google “google” and what do you find when you do that? It turns out that even though there were 320,000,000 options for google pages, none of them were interesting enough to mention here…Hey…gotta go…my bf is here….bye

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The best CGI EVER!!

I’ve said to everybody in my class that I spend my whole day in front of the computer… I wasnt lying… I do! I work in front of the computer, if I go to class I have my laptop, at home…more computer. It turns out that not all the time I spend in front of this technology-full box is NOT productive, and I happen to find this amuzing video that you guys might as well watch for the sake of wasting time

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