Summary of Class

I entered this class with a firm understanding of interactivity and what it means to be interactive. Through the course of this class I am pleased to say that my foundation has been solidified in this area.
The class reading we had to do for the course involved the use of textbooks, but was not limited to text books. The Dreamweaver text was very useful because it helped remind me of many things in Dreamweaver that I had forgotten about and it also taught me many new things that I had not previously been aware of. This is very useful because Dreamweaver is one of the strongest tools to use to make a means of interaction for many people to communicate through. The Pause and Effect book was a lot harder to understand and I really didn’t like it. I found it very abstract and hard to understand.
This class taught me a few things about interactivity. The first of which, and perhaps the most important, was that interactivity is all about the group. This may sound obvious but it is impossible to interact by yourself. There needs to be a group. This was an underlying message that was in everything we did during this course. We had to review that game and provide feedback so that the game could be improved and made a lot better. A group was needed for this and not an individual. The advantage that a group brings is diversity. No one in the group is a like and in possession of the exact same amount of skills as well as the exact same tastes. This allows for a creator to get a wide range of responses that can help them make changes for the best and improve the overall quality of the final product. The differences between people were also shown with the debate website project as well as the fact or fiction project. These two projects showed just how different people are through their beliefs. Many people had firm reasons for voting that would not be changed by whatever another candidate for presidency said. Also the fact and fiction showed that people also have firm reasons that they use to decide whether or not they believe something to be true. It taught me that I need to be more careful of my source selection when I try to prove something.
The other thing that I got out of this course was that interactivity is what you make it to be. You can make things with degrees of interactivity. The more involved people are the more likely they are to enjoy the experience.
Overall I found this class to be very helpful in setting up a solid foundation on just what it means to be interactive.

Website

Here's the link to my website. Hope you all enjoy it. Snowboarding Basics

Happy Holidays

Thanksgiving Review
I went around after Thanksgiving dinner hunting down relatives to view my website and found that the ones that were too stuffed with food to move were the easiest to get to look at my website. I asked my mom, aunt, grandfather, and uncle to all look at my site. All four of them were impressed with it, but that's no surprise because my family doesn't really have the most computer saavy people in it. Anyways, they all liked the content and found it to be very informative to someone who didn't know anything about snowboarding, which was all of them because none of them know how to snowboard. My aunt found the gear page one of the more interesting ones because of the skeleton that was wearing the gear. One of the things that I brought up to them which they thought would be a good idea was the subject of rollovers. I hadn't yet put them in when I showed off my site. When I told them about how I was going to have them they all agreed that would be a good idea. Another thing was the Quicktime movie that I was planning on making to have playing when the index page was opened. They also found that to be an interesting idea that they would like to see. Other than that though my family didn't really provide me with a lot of critical feedback.

Happy Thanksgiving...well not really but soon enough

Snowboarding Website
So I’ve been working hard on my snowboarding website and it’s close to being finished. I haven't really run into any big technical problems that I don’t know how to fix, but I guess I would have to say that my biggest problem is going to be remembering just how to do rollovers exactly as well as how to create hot zones in my website. Also how would I put a QuickTime movie into my opening page so that it can run as soon as someone opens the page up? These are probably the biggest problems I am going to face, besides a few detail problems that I have to go back and fix at a later date when I have more time.

President Bush...again

The Improving World of Voting
I looked up some articles on the new forms of voting to see whether they were successful or not. What I found was surprising to me. I didn’t think there would be as many people using e-voting machines this year as there actually were. In CNN.com's article, "Voting Methods Under Close Watch", apparently Georgia spent $54 million on touch screen voting machines throughout the entire state. They didn’t want to end up like Florida did in the last election so they felt that it was necessary to update their voting methods. Los Angles County registrar of elections Conny McCormack talked about how the move to total electronic voting machines would cost somewhere around $100 million to $120 million and changes like this wouldn’t be made without a lot of consideration. McCormack did claim that he was happy with the present e-voting machines that the county did have for early voting but they still wanted to wait until e-voting technology matured more before they made the switch.
People who used the e-voting machines all seemed very happy with the experience that it gave them. Ken Meehan of Las Vegas said, “‘Technology, we hope, is for the best today. It's better than writing a name on a piece of paper. I'll have to go with the technology.' “Joyce Hicks, also of Nevada had a similar reaction saying, “‘I love the machines. They're very convenient.' “Additional opinions can be found in the CNN article "Nevada improves odds with e-vote." You will notice that the people continue to support the new technique claiming that it is easier to use and much easier to correct mistakes with.
Experts on the use of e-voting machines claim that one reason why these machines can be trusted is because of the paper trail that the machines generate when people vote. These paper trails can be used as a hard copy of the votes that have taken place in the event of a system malfunction. One main point that was brought up was that elections have been tampered with throughout the course of history. The only thing we the people can do about this is spot the problem, correct the issue, and then try to improve things the next time around. So although these systems of e-voting could be potentially vulnerable, experts on them say they are perfectly fine and secure.
Moving on to the topic of the coverage of the campaign I found this election to be a lot lower key than those of past years. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that the NBA opening night of games was on the same night and a lot of people would want to see those games over election results but I really don’t know if that can be the true reason. CNN.com was a very useful site to see how the states were breaking down and it kept track of electoral votes per candidate. This allowed for easy viewing of the most current results. When the election came down to Ohio I couldn’t help but feel like history was repeating itself except this time Ohio was the victim and not Florida. Luckily, though, after some time was spent counting absentee ballots, Kerry eventually conceded to Bush thus preventing another dispute for the presidency like what happened in Florida a year ago. I also just wanted to point out something that I found pretty funny about this years election results. If you look at a map that has the breakdown of what states voted for whom, it looks a lot like the map of Union vs. Confederate states. It really shows how close of an election this really was.
Personally I didn’t interact with this election because I didn’t stand behind either candidate. I made the choice not to vote because I felt that no matter who got elected into office this time around the only real loser was going to be the American public because neither man really seemed fit to lead this nation. This decision not to vote is one that was extremely easy for me and I know that I can sleep at night knowing that I didn’t support either candidate. If I had to choose on candidate though, I would have chosen Sen. Kerry. He won the state of Massachusetts anyways so it’s not like my vote would have truly mattered in the end.
The web, TV, and print didn’t influence my decision as much as you would think. I used the web mainly to get the candidates view points on topics that held a lot of importance to me and then made my decision from that. The only thing TV and print did was continue to update me on what each candidate was doing so I could see that they weren’t making any sudden changes in their stances. I would have to say thought that the internet does in fact make access to information such as a candidate’s stance on a certain issue much more readily accessible and thus making it that much easier to pick a candidate. I don’t know if I’d go to voting on the web quite yet due to the fact that system is still largely under construction still and although it can be extremely secure I think hackers would work their hardest to be able to say that they brought a presidential election down.

MultiMatrix and the Red Sox

Well first things first I want to send some love out to all of those red sox faithful out there who just watched them win the World Series tonight! How sweet it is.
Now I am going to talk about the game that Prof. Marcus had us beta test. First off, I had trouble figuring out what it was that I was actually supposed to do in this game. I knew I had to put the marbles in the slot but I didn’t know the details of what I had to make them all add up to. It took me awhile to find the directions too. So my first piece of advice would be to make the directions more public and obvious to people. A good idea would be to make a screen that has the directions on it before you go to the screen where you pick silver, platinum, or gold difficulty. Other than that, though, I found the game to be very straight forward. It is very easy to beat silver, gold, and platinum once using the same tactic. You could use the same tactic to beat the game on beginner, intermediate, and advanced. This causes me to wonder just what exactly the difference between these difficulty levels is. The only thing that actually got me stuck in this game was when I turned on the mind bender option. Also keep in mind that I never changed the option where it asks you to change the rules for the rows and columns. Just by reading the rules, however, I’d assume this would make it much harder.
As for the commercial appeal of this product I am not exactly sure. It has a lot of potential for a mind game that could eventually annoy people, one other successful example of this is a Rubik cube, but other than that I don’t see many people playing this game to just kill some time or to have fun. This may be my own particular taste but I don’t find mind games as fun as I would find other computer games such as Counter Strike. I think that this product could be successful as a cell phone game though because those games are meant to kill time. So this game would be perfect to have to just kill time with when you are waiting for someone to meet up with you. The game called Snake that you find on almost all cell phones is basically useful for the same idea and it is an extremely popular game (so popular in fact they made a sequel to it). So I think there is definitely some potential to it. The age group that this game should be geared towards is a little uncertain to me as well. It seems a little to advance for younger kids and I don’t see kids around the age of ten being able to stay focused on this game for a long amount of time unless their parents were making them play it. I think this game should definitely be geared at earliest to teenagers.
Overall I would have to say that the game was pretty fun to just mess around with and play. I don’t think I would have looked for a game like that out but it was pretty fun to play to kill sometime. Once I started playing a round I found myself focused on the game because I didn’t want my clock time to get high up there and ruin my score. So there is definite incentive in the game to work hard and fast when you are playing it. However I don’t see anyone wanting to pay to play a game like this do to its basic scheme of moving marbles and doing math and preventing color matches. I think people only really want to pay for games that have more action in them.

Even blogging is open late...

New Website
So it's about one in the morning and I’m doing my blog now. I would have liked to have done it earlier but I’ve been distracted by my new website as well as the red sox game. The main problem I’ve been having though is what to do for my website. I have decided on the topic but the layout is the toughest thing for me right now. I’ve been struggling trying to pick out one layout. I keep trying different ways of putting it all together but they each seem to have at least one kink that I can’t seem to figure out what to do to solve it. Perhaps I am overtired but I just can’t seem to hack it. Anyways i'm going to try to do some more on it so this is all for now.

Debate Website

Here is the link to my Debate Website. Enjoy!

bloggin like its my job

The new website
I'm running into a little trouble with this new project. I can't think of a good idea of something that I know that I can teach and make a website on. I've had several ideas ranging from food recipes to how to tie your shoe but I'm not sure if that is exactly what you are looking for. I know it has to be educational but I don’t know exactly what would be educational enough for this project. I am going to go and do some more thinking on this and look for some ideas.

Back at it...

Website
I forgot to blog last week so I figured I'd make up for it now by doing two blogs this week. First off let me touch on the subject of the website we had to make last week. That was perhaps the worst thing I could have ever been forced to do in my entire life. The main reason is because of my hatred for politics. I don’t think there are going to be any winners in this election, or to be more specific, the American people are definitely losing in this election. So basically having to make a website on the thing I hate most was torture for me. Anyways I got it done and was pretty proud of the results despite the fact that it was a basic website with little visual appeal despite a few buttons with rollovers.
The good thing about having to make this website was that I got out of having to do the reading for the week. Any more exposure to those books and I am going to start crying.

And in today's Blog...

HCI
I looked at the article A Brief History of Human Computer Interaction Technology to find out more about the history of human and computer interactions. Human Computer Interaction, otherwise known as HCI, has been going on since roughly the mid-1960's. The research that has occurred in this area has led to the development of many new interfaces that we commonly use today. The research is basically work that explores the subject of human and computer interaction. This work is done in university, government, and corporate research labs. The two biggest of these being university and government labs. University research has led to some of the biggest improvements in user interfaces that brought us to the point that we are at now. Also government research and funding has definitely improved human computer interactions as well as paved the way for further improvements. Some of the improvements that came about from all this exploration are direct manipulations of graphical objects, the mouse, windows, drawing programs, text editing programs, spreadsheets, hypertext, Computer Aided Design, and video games. These programs didn't just come about and exist the same way then as they do now. Although some of the ideas are the same the research has advanced these devices and programs well beyond the power of the predecessors. Also these fields continue to grow now and advance with the research done by universities, governments, and corporate labs. Research is going to be focusing on the fields of gesture recognition, multi-media, 3-D, virtual reality, computer supported cooperative work, and voice recognition. Although the history is extensive in this field it is important that research continues so that the power of computers can increase continually. Also it is not just the power that can increase but also what you can do with your computer that can increase. So human and computer interaction has stayed relatively the same in terms of ideas for the past 50 or so years, but in terms of public availability and ease of use as well as just what you can do with them, the interactions have grown incredibly.

Readings
Nothing is really new with the readings. I'm finding Pause and Effect a little more interesting now though. Of course its easy to be my favorite reading when its competition is the Dreamweaver book. I still can't stand its simple step by step instruction that gets repeated about 50 times each page. Also the corny jokes need to end.

Underwater pyramids?

In this blog I am going to argue the fact that these underwater structures found off the south shore of Okinawa as well as other places in the area are in fact man made.

The first site I want to look at is here. This site contains an article by a man named Frank Joseph, a publisher for Ancient American Magazine. In it he poses many possible views as to how this could be true. For example there are many right angles that were made too perfectly. No where else has there ever been a natural formation like these. This makes it much more likely for them to be man-made than anything else. Also these pyramids have many more structures, like roads, that make it seem like an ancient civilization once existed there. I'd suggest reading the article to find out more.

The next site is here. This site contains some more interesting information. There was a huge human head sculpture that was found off the southeast Yonaguni Island coast. Although it has been eroded because it has been underwater for such a long time the facial features are still distinguishable. Also there were some ancient hieroglyphs that were found. This shows that there must have been an advanced civilization that lived there.

The final site I have to look at is here. The article is by Laura Lee, a talk show host. In it are some interesting reasons as to why the underground structures are real. The site near the Japanese city of Naha is Okinawa. It contains what looks like a wall with a right angle block. This appears to be what looks like a castle wall. Also the architecture of this wall seems similar to the style of some nearby castles located on the island. The other site that is getting a lot of attention is off the southern island of Yonaguni. This extensive site contains a platform that is composed of five irregular layers which resemble ceremonial, terraced platforms. Also there appears to be what looks like a road the surrounds this site. The argument provided by Prof. Masaaki Kimura, a marine geologist with the University of the Ryukyus, as to why these structures must be man made is that if nature had carved these structures then there would be some debris that would be around the site. At the site, however, there is no debris. Another interesting find is that there seems to be holes in the stone structure that appear to be there for the purpose of holding some wooden structure. As to why these sites sank into the ocean there are a few possible theories. One is that they were flooded when the ice caps melted at the end of the last Ice Age. Another theory is that seeing the sites are so close to the Ring of Fire, tectonic activity might have caused subsidence of the land. Still another theory is that it was a combination of the two.

Going through the motions

Readings
So I did the readings for this week and all I can say is that it was just more of the same. I was not impressed at all. The Dreamweaver textbook is so slow and boring. I feel like I am going to fall asleep every time I start reading it. The only thing that keeps me awake is I want to count all the corny jokes the author tosses in. All this is better than the Pause and Effect book. I can grasp what they say in that book sometimes but the rest of the time I am lost. Maybe its just me and I'm not that smart but sometimes I think the author writes a little too abstractly. Basically what I am saying here is that there is a good portion of the time when I am reading that book that I don't have the slightest clue as to what he is talking about. So as to which textbook is the worse I don't really know but I'm pretty sure that everyone else will get their own conclusion.

Website
I've been thinking about what I wanted to do for a website but the ideas aren't really coming to me that well. I was thinking maybe something to do with snowboarding but I think I need to hear again what it is that we actually have to do with these sites. So I think I'm just going to keep tossing ideas around in my head and I hope I can find the perfect one in that mess.

Another blog to soothe the soul...

Dreamweaver
Not my has changed since my last blog as to what my opinion is about this textbook. The lessons are drawn out and way too long and a lot of them are simple lessons about things that I already know. I know I'm saying how easy it is but that's because I've been exposed to Dreamweaver before and I'm used to a lot of what it has to offer. If I was brand new to Dreamweaver I'm sure id be singing a different song right now. Anyways, I'm sticking with my previous comment about this book being incredibly boring. Chapter six I found to be a total waste of time altogether. The person who wrote the book even said it was because the tag has been deprecated (good thing I didn't put depreciated because the author would have had a heart attack I think). What was the point of that whole little story she gave us anyways on page 169 about those two terms? Who honestly would take the time to put such a random insert in their textbook? That's just weird to me. Anyways I'm still hoping things are going to pick up in the coming chapters.

Pause and Effect
This book was interesting. I wasn't exactly sure why some of the wording was as complicated as it was but I think I'll put that blame on myself because I am pretty tired at the time. I found all the talk about the church painting very interesting. I think its pretty creative of the painter to have that idea to paint the walls like he did. I'm eager to read more this next week so I can find out just what exactly the book is going to talk about.

Kyle Levesque 9/8/04

Reading is fun....
Well with the case of our readings for this week that sure wasn't true at least. I'm sure the Dreamweaver basics were more than enough information for anyone who has never touched Dreamweaver before. Actually if one were to think back to the first chapter this book would be very informational for anyone who has never even heard of html before. I found the book to be very slow paced, not to mention incredible repetitive. Everytime I saw one of those dark gray boxes that said "Warning" or "Note" I would cringe because I knew I was about to read it and most likely read the exact same thing that the author had just stated in the text. The exercises right now weren't extremely helpful yet either but that's expected because we are still so early in the book. One good thing that I found in this book was the website http://www.xguru.com/tutorial/news.asp?id=9. This website provides a nice little introduction to some of the basics of XHTML. Most of the stuff was already pointed out in the book but I enjoyed how this website had some nice visual examples in this introduction. These visuals I figured could make it easier for some people to understand some of the things the textbook was talking about before. Anyways I'm hoping that this book is going to pick up and start giving me a lot more information.

Kyle Levesque 09/02/04

This is my first blog of the year so I know that summer is definitely over now. I'm curious to see just what exactly we are going to be doing in this class and I hope its something fun. Anyways I'll be blogging till winter so this is all for now. Later.