Hmm...It smells like another ArcGIS day to me!

Today we learned how to complete our maps and make them look all professional and pretty. We trimmed our edges, added a grid, made a legend, north arrow, scale and added a title. You can either finish these features in ArcGIS, or you can just open it up in Illustrator. Whatever you feel most comfortable with.

I had a little trouble again figuring out my editor toolbar, but I think I got it now.

The last movie I saw was Stranger Then Fiction for FHE. Everyone talks about how funny it is and how it's one of their favorite movies, but I had never seen it, so it was good to see what all the hype was about. Funny movie, intriguing plot, interesting characters.

The last movie I saw in a theater was actually Twilight with my little brother. I hadn't read any of the books or anything, but my little brother had and he really wanted to see it, so we thought we'd go when we were done with our homework. It wasn't bad. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad.

GPS Day

Today we learned about GPS, and that was super cool. Though I am familiar with running a GPS device, I didn't know a lot of the terminology, so that was very helpful. I'm looking forward to learning how to compile it with ArcGIS for 410, since I didn't really catch most of that this class period. Good times ahead, good times.

The hardest things I have to do in the next two weeks would probably be my Mineralogy final. I have some major ground to cover, it'll be intense.

ArcGIS

Today we learned more about ArcGIS. We made labels and colored our polygons.

I missed last class, so I'm a bit behind, but hopefully I'll be caught up soon.

One of my favorite websites to go to is imdb.com. It stands for the "internet movie database" and it's pretty much just a collection of filmographies and film facts. I go there just because I can't stand it when you're watching a movie and you recognize and actor/actress and you can't remember what you've seen them in. imdb will tell you. It's handy. I like it.

ARCGis Day 2 (or, arcgisday2 I should say...)

Wow, ARCGis is finniky! Sheesh. Today we learned about shapefiles, I'm still not sure what I'm anchoring all this information to, but I hope I'll be there someday soon.

I'm still not sure quite how to do georeferencing, I'll have to get more help on that on Monday.

I start listening to Christmas music whenever I so desire. Sometimes that means December, and sometimes that means June. Christmas spirit all year round!

ARCGis Day

Holy GeoRef Batman! That was pretty dense. I'm not sure I really caught all of that. I'm still not sure how to do the reference points. It seemed like a pretty cool program, but I couldn't really seem to make it work very well for me. I'll probably be coming in early tomorrow to get a few more pointers on it.

I think my favorite book I've been reading lately is the Book of Mormon. Definitely a thriller! Besides that I'm re-reading the Narnia series. I've been on a huge C.S. Lewis fix this last year or so. That man is the bomb! I think the Screwtape Letters is my favorite so far, but I am definitely loving the Christian symbology and subtle philosophies he puts in the Narnia books. Great stuff!

ArcGIS Day - It's all news to me!

Today we started learning about ArcGIS. We didn't get through too much information about it, it seems like a pretty complicated program, but I am excited to learn more.

Things I understand/learned about ArcGIS = little

Things I don't understand = most of it. But it's early yet.

Hmm, my favorite place to eat changes by the day. I'm a variety girl. Guru's is always good, I always gain like, 10lbs when I eat at the Lotus Garden, and I often eat at the Creamery. But none of these places come close to encroaching upon mother's kitchen. Whewee that's good!

Review Day

Today we reviewed for our test which was really good. I'm always better at learning things with repetition, so a lot more things made sense to me today.

I think I understood everything Nichole said, I don't believe I missed anything.

So today for joke time, I'll tell you one that my calculus teacher said this morning. Please note that it was my math teacher who told me this. "What do mathematicians use for birth control? Their personalities." Ha ha, I couldn't believe he told us that, and the funny thing is that his son is actually in that class. I don't know why we find self-deprecation so funny. It's an interesting thing about human nature.

Powerpoint Day

Today we learned lots of really cool things to do with Powerpoint. I learned about links, that was new information. No questions for you though, sorry.

Hee hee, now I get to critique Adam. This is gonna be good...

distracting sound, poor grammer, hard to read text, inconsistent, (good talking speed though), good pictures, distracting graphics, admitted to not practicing presentation, (wow, lots of people are typing lightning speed, well done Adam). You win, nice job.

Poster

Today we learned all about making professional posters. I think I'm finally starting to make friends with Illustrator! I am, even now, brainstorming amazing poster designs and options for my poster. ...Ooh, that's gonna be good...hmm, maybe in red?...well if I increase the font size there...

I didn't catch where to find the official BYU logos, but I'm sure I could find them if I just did a search on the BYU website. No problem.

Let's see, my favorite class in geology would have to be Strat and Sed with Doc Morris. It was just an amazing class. I learned a ton and it totally increased my geological knowledge and vocabulary by an awesome amount. As far as favorite class of all time, my ninth grade Earth Science Honors class totally changed my life and is largely the reason that I am here in the geology program at BYU today. But then, all the geology classes I've taken so far have been extraordinary and I also absolutely love the religion classes here as well. Ah, life is good.

Poster: An anatomical view

Today we looked at posters, and then we looked deeper into posters and then we discussed about what makes a good poster. It was pretty awesome, I hope to make many posters in the future. I really liked what we talked about concerning the symmetry of a poster. Symmetry seems to be the theme of the world right now. We obsess about it in Mineralogy, and we've been talking about it in Calculus. The only thing I need now is some symmetry in Book of Mormon to make my life complete. Does Isaiah's chiasmas count?



Since I missed the last class, I guess I'll just answer the question from last time. I was born in Provo, and then my family moved to Spanish Fork, and then I moved back to Provo where I live now. I've been a lot of places, but I've only really lived in two.

Illustrator

Today we talked about using the Pen Tool to select and divide pictures to create figures from drawings. It was really cool! I'll probably end up using that in my paper. Ha! My geological pallet of tools is becoming larger by the minute! I feel the power seeping through my brain at this very moment that you read this blog! Bwa ha ha ha!

But for all that power, I'm still not quite sure how to manipulate my lines very well. They seem to have minds of their own. Oh well, I'll just do as Nichole suggests and "grab the lollipops and manipulate them" if worst comes to worst.

Since today is a freebee, I'll just use this space to tell you that I saw Dr. Ritter's devotional rebroadcast on the BYU channel last night and I thought it was phenomenal. I miss taking classes from him.

Illustrator day (Happy Halloween!)

Today I learned lots of new things about Illustrator. We worked on creating a strat column, that was super cool. That's a skill I plan on using a lot.

Once again, the lithologic swatches didn't work on this computer. I think it is just this computer, because it wasn't working on Wednesday either.

So, my Halloween plans for the night are pretty awesome. I'm going to DI with a friend of mine where we're going to randomly pick each others costumes, and then we're going party-hopping since there are dozens of parties going on tonight. I'm pretty excited. I need to get out. Happy Halloween!

More Illustrator

Wow, today we went over a whole bunch of new things in Illustrator. Super cool! These programs are awesome! I wish I had taken this class before I took Strat and Sed so that I could've made my own figures. I especially loved the lithologic swatches. That was super awesome, I'm still all excited about it.

The whole tracing tool, (what we did with the cat) didn't work quite the same for me. I think that maybe my options were a little different, I don't know.

Hmm, I've had a lot of cool Halloween costumes, but last year I went as Carmen Sandiego. That was pretty cool. I loved being all red and mysterious and stuff. It was pretty rad.

Illustrator!!!

Illustrator Day! I absolutely loved it! So cool. But I did get a little carried away and now it looks like a schitzophrenic four year old got a hold of my paper, but I had fun with it. Now I'm all full of cool ideas of things I'm going to use Illustrator for. Yipee!

There's tons of things I don't know yet, but hey, it's the first day. No worries

Man, I don't want to know a thing about the future. I can barely handle the past and I'm full of plans for the future hour, so I think knowing the future would overwhelm me. Honestly, I'm glad that life doesn't have a magical crystal ball. Looking at where I've been I wouldn't change a thing, but I'm pretty positive that if you had shown me the future in the past before I had lived it, it would've scared the pants off of me. Yeah, not being able to tell the future was a good call on our Creator's part.

Mini-assignment 4

Wow, this one was pretty neat. I couldn't find any good pictures to merge to make my panorama, so instead I just found one good picture and then copied it three times, merged it and then used the clone tool to make each picture unique enough so you couldn't tell that they're all actually the same picture. Cool huh? I also used color adjust, brightness/contrast, Gaussian blur, and a bunch of other tools that don't really count for the assignment. I didn't replace the sky completely like we did in class, but I definitely replaced it in parts using the clone tool. I hope that counts.

Oh, and since I turned this assignment in early, since it's technically due on Monday since I used the clone tool, can I use that to make up for one of my other mini-assignments turned in late? Come on Adam, it's almost the holiday season. Let's spread the cheer. I promise to pay it forward.

Mini-assignment 3

Wow, I really like this one too. The original image I started out with was so bad! But it looks pretty good now. I used color balance, brightness/contrast, Gaussian blur, burn/dodge, hue/saturation, black/white, and a couple of other things, but that ought to do it point-wise I think. Hmm, now I really need to get a car and not just a really cool picture of one...

Mini-assignment 2

I really like this one. It turned out really well I think.

For this one I used the crop tool, and then I straightened out the image. After all that I adjusted the brightness and contrast of the photo and the color balance. Enjoy all!

Mini-assignment 1

Hey Adam,

Tools used:

Besides choosing a color scheme, I used overlay, crop, blur, (and a bunch of others that I'm not really getting points for, so I'm not going to list them all...)

Thanks!

Good bye fat Italian Man!

Today I learned how to rid my life of fat Italian men. Thank you so much Nichole for that golden drop of knowledge. But seriously guys, the clone tool pretty much rocks. I'm already envisioning a good and happy time making better friends with the clone tool.

I know that there are a ton of things I don't know about Photoshop, and so I look forward to learning a lot more about it.

So I do have a lot of cool superstitions I pay tribute to, but they are mostly only for fun and fake karma. It's actually a really good thing that I don't have any serious superstitions because then I would be in big trouble because I am pretty much the epicenter of many superstitious earthquakes. For example, my birthday is on Friday the 13th every eight years or so (stupid leap year keeps messing things up), I have a black, manx cat at home, and I pretty much step on every crack known to man. So yeah, good times, and good bye-jinx-you-owe-me-a-dollar!

More awesome Photoshop stuff!

Once again, I have almost no experience with Photoshop, so everything we learned today will be placed in my "Golden Drops of Knowledge" bucket. I super loved doing the panarams today! That was so awesome! I'm so designing the next geomorph book!

I'm still not very good at selecting/deselecting the right layers yet, but I'm getting better at it. I guess I just always lose track of where I'm at.

As far as sports go, if it's not soccer or the Olympics, then I'm probably more in it for the socialization and the food. Sorry football fans, but only England does "football" right...

Okay, that last title was an accidental fluke...

Wow, I was all, burning and dodging and sponging today. It was awesome! Basically it was the coolest thing ever. I think that if this whole geology thing doesn't work out for me, I might just become a photoshop expert and make my millions that way.

I got kinda messed up with that whole bandaid option (okay, I thought it was the eraser...), and then I couldn't seem to get my eraser options to work right, but I think it'll work next time. I can always lean over and ask Miriam. She knows everything.

So, one of my favorite Fall activities is, uh, uh, my birthday! Yeah, basically that makes fall rock. It's in mid-November, and it just kinda makes near-end-of-the-semester-stress lighten a bit.

I'll dodge your burn!

Photoshop Day 2

Hmm Hm! Photoshop Day 2! Definitely cool. Once again, everything was new. I really liked the photo manipulation parts. All my texts are looking pretty wild right now. Love it. Sorry Adam, I can't really place exactly what I didn't understand.

So, I've been really lucky to have been on a ton of really great dates, but definitely one of my favorites was a blind date I went on a couple of years ago. It was just a really great date because the people were really great, my date was really great, our activity was really great, everything was just really great. I had a blast. Anyway, I'm going to lunch right now, so if you want more details, you'll just have to ask me later.

Peace

Photoshoppe Day!

Okay, so today was really cool because I had never messed around with photoshop before, so the whole lecture today was new. Looo-ved it! I'm definitely looking forward to messing around with pictures in the future... :P

I don't really know yet what I didn't understand, but I'll let you know later when I'm trying to put it all together!

So, I've had a lot of weird injuries, but I think one of the worst would've been the time when I pulled my hip in a gopher hole on the second day of soccer tryouts my Sophomore year of High School. I was out for like, two weeks. Dumb gophers...

Review Day

So, today we had review for the test day. It was pretty cool, but I gots some studying to do. I definitely appreciated hearing things again. I guess I'm a repetative learner.

I'm still not sure that I'm kosher with the whole hyperlink thing, but I'll just ask my neighbor and catch up on that one.

Once upon a time, when I was a young tot, I had a kitten named Rocky (so named after the oldest brother on the 3 Ninjas. Heeyaw!). However, much to my dismay, my siblings called him Sampson (I know! Crazy right?!). Anyway, I loved Sampson a lot, and life was good. Until that fateful weekend when we went to Idaho. Oh, the weekend was fine....for us. Sampson however met his untimely fate underneath the hot rubber wheels of a heartless driver, and spent the rest of his weekend smeared on the street outside of our house. Sigh. The horror. Don't worry, my parents mostly shielded me from the sceen, but I was a creatively graphic kid. Sniff. Anyway, that's the end so, The End...

Wow, today we learned a ton about Excel 2007. Pretty much everything that we learned about graph manipulation was news to me. Props Nichole. I'm going to be an amazing grapher someday!

The whole "select data" business was still a little confusing to me. I think that, if left to my own devices, I would find round about ways to do what I could do there. I think I'll have to see it again a couple of times before I'm confident enough to do it on my own.

So, if money wasn't an issue, I would totally see the world. I would go hiking through the Himalayas. I would helicopter over Alaska. I would kayak through the Amazon. I would definitely tour Europe. I would take a jeep to the African Savanna. Check out the outback! Gah, now I'm getting excited and the only trip I have to look forward to today is to the JKB. Oh well. Someday.

Excel

The largest difference was 8592.8m.

Sorry Nichole, but I absorbed it all...

Ooh, and for Sunday morning I love awesome omletts with fun stuff in it. But cinnamon rolls are tasty too.

So today we went over the assignment due for the day. That was pretty helpful, props for that.

I'm still not all square about the Excel stuff, but I think I'll just play with it in some of my free time and be cool with that.

I play several instruments. None of them particularly well, but not bad. My best would probably be the bari saxophone though. I love playing jazz especially. Way too much fun!
I would love to learn more piano and guitar though. I think they're really beautiful instruments. Ooh, and the clarinet/oboe would be really neat too!

Adobe Professional

Hey Nichole,
So, basically, that was probably the coolest lecture ever. Pretty much I'm going to make friends with Adobe now I think. Seriously, that was really awesome! I lvoe the stamp and writing tools. My fav.

I'm still not quite sure how to manipulate some of my toolbars, but I think I'll figure it out okay.

Yeah, I have a lot of weird relatives, but really, who doesn't? But near the top of the list would probaby be my uncle Gary. He looks like Santa Clause in leather who rides a Harley. Seriously, I love him, he's awesome, but he's jolly 'ole Saint Nick gone baaad. Duuude!

Review day!

So, once upon a time, there was a 230 class who did their very best to listen to their teacher, Nichole. One day she taught them how to review papers, and the class did their very best to learn how to highlight, make comment bubbles, and translate words into Arabic. In this class there was a girl named Taryn. Taryn tried very hard to learn all these wonderful editing tips like the rest of her hardworking classmates, but unfortunately she was not able to fully grasp the idea of a reviewing pane. Taryn was so frustrated that she changed her major to psychology, and graduated from the U. The End.

JK, it was a good lecture Nichole.

Worst movie ever: Ouch, I've seen a lot, and can't narrow it down. Uh, Rolling Thunder Hear My Cry is high up there though.

Soon to be posted here: [copy of a paragraph from Taryn's proposal]

Site under construction

(sorry Adam, I'm not happy with my proposal paragraphs yet, but I will have one on here tonight.)

In the meanwhile:

Earthquakes have cost the lives of nearly 400,000 people in the South Asia region in the past two years. These earthquakes and associated tsunami are sourced from a build-up of stress due to convergence of the Indo-Australian and Asian Plates. As a result to stress buildup, the Timor region of the Indonesian Tsunami Machine has some of the most extensive flights of emergent coral reef terraces in the world. This paper proposes to investigate these marine terraces for the purpose of quantifying the distribution of strain over a range of temporal and spatial scales in a unique arc-continent collision zone.

Word.

Hello folks!

So, today was good, I learned a lot about my website.

Unfortunately I was unable to actually do any of that since my site wasn't working. I need to learn how to make this dealeo work since I'm behind now. So if you have time later Adam, some help would be appreciated. :)

When I was a kid, I was going to cure aids. Seriously, for years I was convinced that that was my purpose in life. I guess that the only way that that dream will be realized now is if the cure can be found in some rock or mineral. Who knows? Maybe that's the answer.

Kim's lecture

Yo yo! Well, I took a web design class, as well as several other computer classes, so I didn't really have any new big sparkling revelations, but I was amused with Kim's references to "trojans".

Yeah, I'm not sure I'm good friends with BYU's geology site yet, but I will play with it and friendship will come.

My favorite food(s - really, why pick only one?) would definitely have to be pasta anything and then ice-cream anything. But really, who's gonna whine with some good home cookin'?

Superhero Power

So today I was kindly reminded of wonderful ways to improve my writing. I appreciated the "finding your prime time to write" section. Definitely helpful.

So, if I had a superpower, I think I would either be able to fly or heal. Either would totally rock.

You didn't fail Nichole, I didn't know about endnote, that was cool. Hope you're doing well.

Anyway, if I were a color, I would be blue. I'm just kind of a cool, chillin' kind a color. Goes well with a lot of things, but not everything. Is really different when you mix me with different colors, but if you mix too much, I go grey.

Hope that answers your question!

Good lecture today Nichole. Definitely new information. I'll make sure to hang onto the notes for when I'm writing proposals in the future.

By the way, the cool trivia fact of the day is that a baby blue whale can gain 200 pounds per day as it drinks 50 gallons of it's mother's milk! Crazy eh? It was on my cheesestick this morning, so it must be true. That would actually be an amazing dream vacation to go swimming with the whales! Basically my dream vacation would be relaxing, fun and interesting. I would be doing something or seeing something that I've never seen or done before and doing it with people that I love. Sigh, is it summer yet?

Bill's lecture

Wow, great lecture Bill! I really learned a lot about interviewing! I feel a lot more confident in preparing myself to get out there and look for a job.

I think if I was preparing for a job, I would tell my interviewer that I would differentiate myself by telling them that I'm a good arguer, and feel confident in myself to persuade others on behalf of the company.

Don't know if that's exactly what you wanted Nichole, but that's what I got.

So, today we went over CV's and cover letters. That's cool, I haven't done either of those in a while. Once again Nichole, I don't think I have any questions yet. Maybe I'll just save them all up for a while and then blast you with them all at once. No, just kidding.

Okay, so the best prank ever: You release three pigs or goats or chickens or something into a building and number them 1, 2, and 4. You'd be amazed how long people will comb the building looking for wild animal 3! Way too funny.

I learned that hitting the "alt" button makes all the hot keys show up! Now I can feel like a cool geek that knows all the hot keys and can move like lightening! Finally all my high school dreams are coming true! A-ha!

No questions for you though Nicole, you're just too good at explaining things I guess.

So, I also have a really awesome scar below the right side of my mouth from where I got bit in the face by a doberman. Yeah, moral of the story is don't hug dobermans, ever. It actually wasn't that bad. I was maybe seven years old and I went into shock and all I remember is a lot of pink because that's the color of the neighbor lady's bathroom who tried to clean me up after her dog almost ate my head. Fun story, good ice-breaker on an awkward date...

First 210 Lecture

Hey, today we learned what all those cool little icons mean in Word 2007. English teachers of the future beware! Competent students are coming!