Looking Good!

Pretty soon you will learn how to link pictures to more content. That way visitors can click on an image to get more info about it. Click on the Oskie Bear.

Keep up the good work.

Working With Audacity

If you choose to work with Audacity, it is very similar to garage band. The same concept of recording audio and encoding it is present. When recording with Audacity, after you have recorded your audio and are ready to finish, choose File: Encode as WAV.



This will save the audio recorded to the computer as a .wav file.



After you are finished with this, you can find the file (probably on desktop) and play it within iTunes or Quicktime. If needed, you can drop this file into garage band and work with it there, too.

Audacity for Mac OS X

This link should open the download for Audacity 1.2.5
A window will open, it is downloading the file.
When it is done downloading, double click on the folder and open Audacity.app to run it.

Pulitzer Prize Photos

The Boston Fire photograph me struck me as a tragedy caught in the moment it happened. The lady and her child were photographed falling from a collapsed fire-escape, down to the ground. Miraculously, the child survived. The lady, however, did not. This picture made me feel the terror and danger of building fires, and the safety that is required to save lives. If that fire-escape had held on, the fireman would have rescued the two girls, saving a life in the process. It pains me to know that this tragedy could have been prevented.



Welcome Home symbolized the return of what Americans had been waiting for. Six years the Prisoners of War (POW's) were kept in a North Vietnam prisoner camp. This picture portrays a moment of happiness, a moment of a long-awaited return to the families struggling without their fathers. Welcome Home struck me deeply in emotion, almost as if you could feel how much they had missed their husbands/fathers. To miss someone for six years, it had to be emotionally crushing. The look of pure happiness on the faces of the families of the returned POW's, shows how incredible a moment this photo captured.
Ragga :]

Death of A Marine

On August 14, 2009 in Helmand, a southern province of Afghanistan, Lance Corporal Joshua M. Bernard was fatally wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade that blew off one leg and severely injured the other. While laying on the ground injured, an AP Photographer, Julie Jacobson, captured the images of Bernard lying below two soldiers helping him. Jacobson later decided to publish the photo, deeming it portrayed the 'grimness of war and the sacrifice of young men and women fighting it'.
Her reasons for publishing the photo were securely defended by the Associated Press, who also agreed that the image needed to be shown to the public about the reality of the war. However, Bernard's father argued against the image being published, saying that it was 'disrespectful to the memory of my son'. He argued that the image was too graphic, and also held the support of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates. Gates wrote letters to the president of the Associated Press, strongly asking him to reconsider publishing the photo. They later reconvened, but came to the same decision of publishing the image.
On a personal note, while I respect the wishes of Bernard's father and mother, the image does convey a strong reality in war. However graphic the image was, the public needed to know the true situation. The Associated Press also does have the right to produce the image, anyway.
Ragga.

Shooter

Walter Dean Myers has broken the barrier with writing about a young, past-the-edge teen, named Len. In the story, a number of police investigators question Len's friends, Cameron and Carla. The writing is in question-answer format, telling the events leading up to, and the events during, a tragedy. The police learn through questioning, that Len was severely picked on in school, and was taking multiple drugs to suppress his anger and depression. Len, Cameron and Carla call themselves "outsiders". Basically meaning 'rebel', but with other ideals that include clothing changes, and non-conformity. Len's dad works at a firing range, and Len loved to shoot. Eventually he took Cameron and Carla there to shoot with him, and they were getting used to it too. The police came to realize that because of the trauma in the life of a young teen, actions were taken that are irreversable, and tragic.

Photo Manipulation

Recently, we researched altered photos on the Net. Most images were broadcasted by television, some by magazines, and some just in competition. Ethically, is it wrong to alter an image? My opinion is yes, only if you do not label the image as being altered. Changing how something is seen, is changing what it represents. An example is this first photo. This photo is made to look as if Haiti is in horrible condition, with the ground being a muddy brown, the sky looking dim, shadows looking darker than usual. Colors are bright and dirty, and things seeming pretty slummish. But, this sparked the interests of the Danish Photo Contest judges, and they asked the author, Klavs Bo Christenen, to submit the RAW-version of the picture. The second photo, the RAW-version, is way different from the published photo. He had added shadows, darkened the picture altogether, brightened colors, changed some, even. The picture was sharpened, and slightly cropped as well. Largely, the ground was made to seem twice as dirty, and the sky twice as dim and intense. Christenen had taken the retouching too far on this image, and it was wrong to do so without stating the fact so. Ethically, this was wrong.
Ragga. -_-

Edge of Hope

I'm sitting here on the edge of hope
Looking through my cosmic telescope
At a world looking back at me
From the wrong side of eternity
And the only clue that my poor brain finds
Is a world I've already left behind
I've already left behind
I've already left behind..
Ragga?

HTML Code

[OMG] After about twenty minutes of messing around with the HTML code on my template, I figured out a few things.

First: I learned how to make your background image ANY image you want.
Second: I learned how to change any color or font of any part of your page.
Third: I learned how to make the body of your page transparent so you can actually SEE your background.
Fourth: I learned that you can pretty much adapt anything on the page to how you want it.

After reading this, and you have questions or comments, ask me in class or at school. I will explain this, and if you have any questions about modifying something, I will show you. HTML code is NOT that hard to understand, you just have to get down the basics.
Ragga. :D