This weekend I will be heading out to Fort Wayne, IN with five of my friends. We have a hockey game and lazer tag planned, but I hope we do more than just that. Also, I’m writing this post using Flock, the coolest thing I’ve seen since ScreenToaster.
I have but one final left, which will take place on Saturday. I can’t believe that my freshman year is over. It seems like just yesterday that I was worried about making friends in college. Although, I have learned many things, and not only in my classes. Here’s some of what I’ve learned:
I’m sorta glad that I have the next few months off for a few reasons, like catching up with my old friends, getting some time away from my college friends, and sleeping in my own bed again.
Today was the last day of interviews for me. I was interviewing for jobs next school year in the IT department. I interviewed for the Help Desk on Tuesday, and Web Services on Thursday. I only applied to the two fields that I knew I would feel comfortable in. The full time staff member who interviewed me for the Web Services basically told me that I had the job. He was really happy to see that I was interested in the job, and he asked me what position I wanted. This made me feel really good about myself, basically knowing that I have a work-study job next year. I was nervous about the whole “find a job” process, but really it was rather pleasant. My Help Desk interview lasted for a good hour and a half, but it felt like 45 minutes. It was, in one word, fun.
This can only help me with my WVUR webmaster position, and my major. Yay!
Today, it is official. I have changed my major.
I am now technically a “New media Journalism” major instead of an Electrical Engineer. Also, I’m minoring in Television - Radio. “Why did I change?”, you might ask. Well, to be totally honest, I didn’t like my physics anymore because it was getting integrated with the calculus that I was “learning”. I put learning in quotes because I was doing poorly in that class. So if you notice that I’m not showing up to Calculus 2 or Physics 2 anymore, that is the reason.
One of the reasons I did want to change majors was because I didn’t know what I wanted what I wanted to do with my career, and I knew that my poor skills in Calculus were going to catch up to me. I would also like to have a career in something that is interesting me right now, as a student. I am now the webmaster of WVUR, SAE, and hoping to get a web team job in IT here at Valpo.
I thought it was smart to change now, as a freshman. Also, you may wonder, “Well, engineering jobs pay more than communication jobs” and you’re totally right, but if you don’t get to the point of graduation because you can’t pass your classes, then it doesn’t matter how much you could make.
Don’t worry though. All of my current classes are going well (all A’s). I will be taking 6 credit hours of classes this summer to maintain my sophomore status.
I was elected webmaster this past semester for SAE, which is pretty exciting. The old website was pretty boring and some of the internal links were broken. If you went to the members page, the only way to get to any other page was to hit the back button in your browser. All of the links on the page were broken. I decided that I wanted to have a nice looking page that had good structure, and also showed off how cool our supermileage car is. After I got FTP access to the server for the SAE website, I got to work. As always, I worked on the index page first by getting a good layout, creating links, and getting a nice background image. After that, I duplicate that index file about seven times, rename each instance to something like “gallery”, “about”, etc. I then modify each page to look like it’s supposed to. I got rid of everything except for the header and footer on the gallery page so that the Flickr slide show would fit on the page.
If you want to see how it looks, check out the New Valpo SAE Page at www.valpo.edu/student/sae/index.html
With exactly one week of classes until spring break, you could imagine that I’m getting excited. Why am I getting excited? The main reason is because I’m exhausted. I have had many a day of studying and working my butt off. Also, I was sick this past Monday. My throat was a little swollen the night before, but I didn’t want to freak out right away. My wise mother advised that, if it still hurt, I should go see a doctor. When I woke up it still hurt, so I didn’t go to classes. I found a doctor that was covered by our health insurance online. I had a 2 pm appointment with doctor Joe. He was really cool and was pretty sure that I didn’t have strep, but he wanted to make sure. I went to the lab and got my throat swabbed. On Thursday I learned that I was not infected with the “strep-ness”. I was still sick, though, and I was tired. Luckily, I have defeated this bug and am feeling much better.
I’m unsure of what I’m doing with my family over spring break as of right now. One thing I am sure of is what I’m going to do on the 12th of March. I will be going up to visit my girlfriend, Lindsay. I’m pretty excited about that. She has seen my hometown dwelling already, so I’m excited to see what her hometown is like.
I should be writing before this Friday, but nothing is set in stone. Peace.
Like most well formed websites, WVUR wants to add more graphics to their pages. Jeremy came up with a way to grab a random picture from the SourceStock image folder, which is working quite well. One issue with the site, or rather valpo’s server in general, is that you can’t see the files you upload until an even hour. For example, if you upload a picture, it will be uploaded right away, but it won’t go to the live site until 4, 6, 8, 10 pm. If you upload a picture at 4:05, you have to wait until 6 until the stage loads it. However, the CMS runs on MySQL, which is an ever refreshing database, so if we write a blog and the picture we want is already live on our server or another server (aka Flickr), the picture will show up right away.
On a whim, I suggested that we set up a Flickr account for WVUR and just upload pictures there. Jeremy wondered how easy it would be to have everyone upload, though. Whenever you introduce another feature, it shouldn’t require a new login or page to go to, that’s just a simple rule. Jeremy, on a whim, wondered if Joomla, the CMS we use for WVUR, made an component that would allow upload to Flickr. We couldn’t find one in the twenty minutes we spent looking, but we did find a PHP script that would do the exact same thing. Sweet! If that turns out to be a hassle, we could always just make a page that has Flickr in a “frame” (technically a wrapper) on the WVUR page.
What does this mean for our audience? More pictures, and faster! Woo!
So my show with Nathan was this morning from 8-10 am, and overall I am very happy with how it turned out. I was a little uneasy my first half hour, but that was mainly because I was nervous. After Nate came at 9, things started to flow much better and I got much more comfortable. Also, we got our hands scanned so that we can enter the station early and we don’t have to be let in by someone else, which is nice.
Be sure to listen on Tuesday mornings from 8-10 am!
It’s been a while since I actually wrote anything that wasn’t assigned, but that’s all about to change.
I am happy to announce that I will be hosting a radio show on WVUR 95.1 from 8-10 am every Tuesday morning. My first hour of programming will be like a wake-up call to all listeners, followed by the news that happened while you were asleep. There will be awesome music as well.
The second hour of the show will be a mix between a talk session with my friend Nate and some more music. Guest appearances will probably happen in this second hour of radio rambunctiousness. I will play songs that I know like OKGo, The Vines, and some older songs like Money.
The mission of the show is to be insightful, fun, awakening, and enjoyable.
For all of you that fall out of the Valparaiso radio range, I hope to podcast the show (at least the talking part, because the music is illegal to podcast) on the website for the station, which is http://www.valpo.edu/wvur.
I hope you tune into 95.1 FM!
This article was taken from http://www.valpo.edu/it/summit/vol2iss4/fellows-websites.php
With the first of four rotations in IT Fellows’ inaugural year drawing to a close, student cohorts in the Web Rotation took the opportunity to show off just how far they’ve come in only six weeks. As part of the Web Rotation, IT Fellows are tasked with creating and presenting a fully functional Web site. The rotation requires IT Fellows to develop project management techniques, conduct research, work collaboratively, and demonstrate comprehension of newly acquired skills. The rotation is quite a challenge for these freshmen, but they were more than up to the task.
The cohorts elected to build sites for a fictional movie and musical group. Each team researched the core components for their type of site, conceptualized their site’s design, assigned project roles and responsibilities to team members, and established a timeline and milestones. Students were also asked to journal about the experience over the course of their six-week rotation and post reflections to the Web Rotation Blog.
In order to complete the self-guided project, the IT Fellows identified their pre-existing Web skills and worked together to learn any of the areas where there was a knowledge gap. The freshmen students spent time learning HTML, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and Illustrator to code their web pages, create graphics, and post the site to a live web server. One cohort even filmed and edited a short video trailer as part of their project.
“Working as a team and accomplishing each page together was a very fun experience,” said Anna Urish, freshmen IT Fellow. “My teammates were very helpful with teaching me Photoshop and informing me of many other useful tips that have allowed me to form a base with my Web design knowledge.”
“I had a lot of fun working in the web rotation. My cohort really helped with getting the tasks completed on time and in a high quality fashion. I really enjoyed this rotation and I hope the rest of this year emulates this rotation,” added Jeff Lange, freshmen IT Fellow.
Each rotation completed by freshmen IT Fellows is designed to build knowledge and experience across many different facets of Information Technology. IT Fellows select from rotations in many different areas of IT with the Web rotation being the sole mandatory rotation. As freshmen IT Fellows progress from year to year, skills are developed to benefit the university as a whole and enhance each Fellow’s education with valuable technology experience. The focus of the first year is training and a broad exposure to the technologies that are redefining work in the digital age. IT Fellows participate in four six-week training rotations in areas, such as web design, hardware and software support, graphic design and digital video. During the second year, Fellows begin semester or year-long, on-campus internships in areas of their choice. Fourth-year IT Fellows and Senior Fellows work on the most important and sophisticated technology projects on campus.
According to Jeni McIntosh-Elkins, Coordinator of the IT Fellows Program, “The Information Technology Fellows Program will provide Valparaiso University students with an unparalleled opportunity to link the traditional strengths of a Valpo education with the technology training and skills needed to succeed in an increasingly digital world. These sites provide a small sample of these student’s talents and capabilities.”
Take a look at the sites built in the first Web Rotation:
