WILL STUDY FOR FOOD

When anyone asks me what colleges I'm considering, I always answer, "Davis, Berkeley, or maybe Stanford if I can scrounge up enough scholarship money." Not to blow myself up, but I think I have a decent chance of getting into Stanford if I applied, but Stanford's tuition is stupid expensive. I actually got to talk to a guy who goes to Stanford (literally walked up to a guy in a San Francisco coffee shop who had a Stanford Tree sticker on his laptop... proud of myself for that) and he said that the school actually gives a ton of financial aid to students every year. However, even with financial aid, Stanford is still reeeally expensive compared to Davis and Berkeley. Actually college is just expensive period. Therefore, scholarships are a good thing! The amount of scholarship money I earn will determine how much student loan debt I'll have to pay off, and may even influence my college choice. So, I intend to earn as much as I can.

About an hour ago I signed up for Fastweb, because the College Board scholarship search isn't all that great. At Fastweb, I found something called the Digital Innovation Scholarship, asking for "a 500 - word essay describing your personal experience with internet entrepreneurship, or the importance of new ideas in the digital realm. Topics could include user experience, visual design, or any other aspect of digital information you find interesting." I happen to know a lot about typography, so I'll write my essay about the importance of typography in websites, and specifically how the introduction of web fonts has changed the face of Internet typography. This will probably be one of my more interesting essay topics!

VOCABULARY #3

This is it! Tonight, the epic story that began week one and continued week two reaches its stunning conclusion! You don't want to miss this one folks!

WHY THIS BOOK?

For my first literature analysis, I chose 1984 by George Orwell. I've always been intrigued by dystopian novels, ever since reading the contemporary Uglies trilogy and the more classic Brave New World. Freshman year, I enjoyed reading Animal Farm (also by George Orwell) so I knew I liked the author, too. I was also interested in learning the story behind the many allusions to the book that have become very common (especially "Big Brother") so all in all it was a pretty clear choice.

Music players!

Alright, I saw Dr. Preston's post about music players, and I said, "Hey, I can do that!"

I know of 3 ways to embed music players: YouTube, SoundCloud, and my personal favorite, Listube. UPDATE: Lindsey Wong found the SCM player, which is also really awesome. I tried it out myself (you can see it at the top of this page), but I found that the code is a little tricky, so I hope Lindsey doesn't mind if I explain it a little here, too. DOUBLE UPDATE: I was so sad when I found that the Listube player didn't work for YouTube videos, and I knew there just had to be a way to embed video playlists without actually making a playlist on the YouTube website. It took me awhile, but I finally found the solution at Stack Overflow. Read on for examples and instructions of all five methods! (Although this page is getting reeeeeeally laggy from all the stuff I put on it... sorry about that! ^^;)

VOCABULARY #2

Well, if you liked my Adventure Time vocabulary story last week, you're in luck, because I made a sequel!

Beowulf Mindmap

For those of you who are still working on your Beowulf questions (like me!), I invite you to collaborate on the unofficial official Beowulf mindmap! To access the mindmap, click here. You can also see our progress below:



We're having some technical difficulties though-- for whatever reason, even though I set the map to public, you can't edit unless you have a premium account or unless your account has been added to the editing permissions list. So if you're interested in using the mindmap to collaborate on the assignment, you can make a Mindomo account (Google connect seems to work well), and then email me/text me/comment to this post, and I'll add your account to the permissions list. [EDIT: Thanks for the comments guys! They disappeared because Dr. Preston recommended that I delete them, so your email addresses aren't just hanging out for the entire Internet to see (especially since my blog happens to get lots of spambot traffic)]

Alternatively, you can login to Mindomo with the class sockpuppet account (username: prestonaplitsockpuppet@gmail.com
password: 3duc4t10n) and add your own email address to the permissions list, then re-log in with your real account. In the upper-right corner, there is a button labeled "Share"; click it, go to "share settings," and enter your email address in the box. As long as you use that email address to make an account, you'll be able to edit the mindmap.

See you there!

Pride and Prejudice Relationship Map

Lo and behold, my first attempt at mindmapping!



Solid red lines = in love/married
Dotted red lines = possibly in love/maybe going to marry
Solid black lines = dislikes
Dotted black lines = slighltly dislikes
Green lines = friends

Colored boxes show family relationships (black boxes are neutral/unrelated)

Notice how all the lines seem to converge on Elizabeth