Scavenger Hunt

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1w8fYK2vUkyq22VzUpBS_l607sbxZvDOwfE4uG6hZB9E/edit?usp=sharing

You can't miss it ^

There's the progress we have on the scavenger hunt in a document you can see being edited live. Does thus post need 250 words too? (͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

The Sea of Uniqueness - Thoughts On Guest Speaker Erik Hanberg

Our guest speaker on Monday the 24th spoke about his experiences with self publication and it got me thinking about using technology to publish yourself or your products. How does technology affect publication? Publicity? Advertisement? Does it help you or your product become more noticeable than others? What if the "others" all do the same? Is your product still more noticeable, or was it just placed in another sea of others? It's almost undeniable that technology and perhaps even just the internet itself can give you a huge advantage in advertisement and publicity for a book, a movie, or whatever it may be. The thing is, the effectiveness seems to decrease as a platform, such as the internet or maybe a website, grows larger. I would argue the most ideal way to publish something is by putting it on a growing platform, where that something is unique to anything else on that platform. In other words, you want to find the sweet spot where a platform is large enough that a lot of people will see it, giving you better results, but not so big that your product goes unnoticed along with many others. Unfortunately, a platform like this is rare, hard to find, and hard to predict. There's not much we can really do besides spread our advertisements everywhere we can and hope it takes off. That's why we jump on new inventions like the internet, always eager to try and get the snowball rolling. Even if you think you have something unique, if you throw it into the sea of uniqueness, is it really unique after all? Did that even make sense?

The Source - My Experience With a Basic Hypertext Markup Language Page

I've created multiple web pages using HTML in Adobe Dreamweaver so I thought I'd just play with some unfamiliar tags. The packet given in class mentioned the marquee tag, which I have never heard of. After playing around for a bit, I came up with a paragraph in which I copied and pasted, split up each sentence leaving one per line, and used the marquee tag to scroll each sentence across the screen at declining speeds. This looked bad because the faster and shorter sentences finished and looped first, so I looked into limiting the loop count. After this, I left just the last sentence without a loop limit, so each line would scroll making a slanted pattern of sentences, while the last, and slowest, sentence would loop forever. I was thinking perhaps the last sentence of a real meaningful paragraph for a real webpage might be shown in this way to leave more of an impact.

This got me thinking about how there can be so many parameters and possibilities hidden behind one simple tag. Not to mention all the colors, sizes, and font possibilities with the text used in other tags. Although considered primitive when compared to the modern website, the unlimited possibilities with using basic HTML to create a page is arguably more advanced.

Cognitive Reference - Mail & eMail

The idea that new inventions are named to evoke previous knowledge in consumers is quite interesting to me. Cloud storage gives us the idea that it's up in the air like a cloud. Notebook laptops perhaps give us an idea of their size or main purpose. Most notably, email gives us the idea that it's very similar to regular mail. Both are methods of communication but vary greatly in cost and speed. Emails are sent and received almost instantaneously, while postal mail can take days depending on distance. Postal mail can be used to deliver physical objects such as money, checks, even packages of stuff, whereas email can only send digital information. Photos can be sent through email without needing to be printed out, saving money. Email can be used to communicate the same message to many people without the need to mail multiple letters. Emails can send links that can be easily navigated to through the receiving party's computer, whereas a link sent through postal mail would have to be manually typed in. Although email has many advantages over postal mail, it seems that, at least within the foreseeable future, email could become obsolete while postal mail would not. Instant messaging systems are now being used as a more practical way to quickly communicate while email is left as sort of a formal communication system, used in schools and in businesses. It's possible that we will see some service combining the these two into a universal communication system under a different name entirely. This is, at least, more likely than teleportation being invented to send large physical items and packages around the countries. For a long time to come, we should expect to still have postal mail to send gifts to our relatives or even shipping companies to bring us our impulse-bought items online. Although it's truly unlike that any drastic changes with mail or email will happen anytime soon, we have to consider how fast technology movies and how quickly aspects of it grow out of date. Only time will tell.

Redemption - What I Want Out of This Class

I hate being forced to take a class that I don't like or don't need. A lot of people would agree with me that it's difficult to take something away from a class if there is little there to take, it's frustrating to be in, or if, perhaps, the teaching style is difficult to work with. In fact, I transferred out of my required writing course just after 2 days of class because of a conflict in my a schedule and because of a personal conflict with the content. That being said, when I was told I had to take an elective course I decided that I wanted it to be a class that I would enjoy. Now obviously that's not a unique idea, everybody wants to enjoy their classes, but I wanted it to be a class that I would take even if I wasn't required to. This way, I feel like I'm doing what I want to do not what I'm forced to do. Since I'm studying for an information technology degree in hopes to do UWT's cyber security masters program, I figured this course would be very enjoyable for me. Although I wasn't really sure what to expect when going into the class, I was more than right about it being enjoyable. The class is mentally engaging, interesting, and about a topic I love. I was essentially hoping to get a fun, interesting, and worthwhile elective class experience out of this course and I'm quite sure that is exactly what I'm going to get.