Excel Skills from Lynda

Lynda.com is a great resource for a quick tutorial on anything computer oriented. I have thoroughly enjoyed using this website to draw on for excel and word. I will most likely end up going through some of these tutorials in order to refresh on minute details before the midterm. I honestly have no complaints about lynda, shes awesome!  I am so glad we are going over how to properly use excel because it is such a frequently used program in school as well as the workplace. Learning some essential skills will really go a long way. Whether you are using excel to collect profit data as economics major, or plotting graphs for a lab class excel is truly something every student needs to know.

Copyright Law: Black and White, with Shades of Uncertainty

The Debate
Copyright law is a form of "intellectual property" that allows for artists, authors and any individual with an idea to protect it, redistribute it and in many cases, make a profit from it. This makes an individual's work a sort of tangible mean of expression. Copyright is also said to incentivize creativity. Currently, Copyright is an evolving  form of law in today's judicial system. When a person breaks copyright law, it is called copyright infringement. Not to be confused with plagerism, copyright infringement is taking or copying something without paying for it sufficiently, whereas plagerism is claiming authorship of a work that is not your own. There are many debates on whether or not something is technically not your own. One of the most interesting debates in this area is whether or not an artist doing a song cover of another artist is technically considered copyright infringement. So many up and coming artists become known through recreating or doing a take on a song created by someone else.  Personally, I feel that information, art, and music are things that should be shared and recreated. I don't think torrenting music is the answer, but I would not consider a cover copyright infringement either. We must be able to find a happy medium to appreciate music and art without harming the creator in any way.

Copyright Quiz
Q:An elementary school transcribes the lyrics from the album "Cats" and puts it on as the school mini-musical. A teacher plays the music by ear on the piano and the students perform every song. There is no admission charge. This is legal.
A: False.
I was suprised to find out that schools cant use media or re-enact plays without the permission of the owner. Mistakenly, I considered this to be "fair use" but apparantly in this situation it isnt. 

Copyright: Shades of Uncertainty by Hayley Sayrs is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

One's Self in a Spectrum

The self reflects life as life reflects the self. 

Contrast.

Duality.

Light.

Dark.

The elements of living that we transcribe into art.

We are the colors of this spectrum called life.

 Heavy rain and sun rays meeting at the perfect moment.

A rainbow.

A smile.

How do you make every day worth while?

Learning from Lynda

I had no problems using the lynda tutorial system. Self-paced tutorials are always favorable in my opinion due to the fact that I can be in my PJ's in bed (lol). Also, it is nice to be able to skip past things that I am familiar with as well as replay things that I want to hear again.

I am so glad Lynda taught me about the photo browser feature in word. It is so much faster to import media to word documents with this feature. I have been doing it the long way my entire life! I also learned how to edit and change borders for tables in word. I will be using these newly learned features to make creative flyers and tables I use all the time.

TU Network Diagram

Network Server Diagram

Check out this informative diagram about the Trinity network and the different types of folders and drives we have access to as Trinity students!

Mantra of the Day:

All great changes are proceeded by Chaos - Deepak Chopra

Provided by Zen Quotes

Best Tech Tip

Ender gave some great underground IT information in class today. Newly located in the Winn 042 tech center, you can find some awesome people to help with any computer problems. What I thought was the most useful tip was that if I have problems with my iphone or need screen repair I can ask these IT guys for help after hours (with the addition of some monetary incentives).

Thanks again Ender!