¡Hola fellow ds106ers!

I hope you all had a great week, and congrats, we survived bootcamp!

This week was kind of tough for me. My schedule got a little messed up at the beginning of the week thanks to the three-day weekend, so I fell a little behind in all of my classes. Also, the snow and freezing cold made me super duper lazy; I didn’t want to leave my bed at all. Thankfully, for this class, I don’t have to! Anyways, here’s a run-down of week 2:

Email

Not too interesting. The email I made is [email protected]. Email me!

List of Class Blogs

Yes, my blog is listed along with everyone else’s! But for some reason, the title of my blog shows twice? Can someone help me fix that?

Customizing My Blog

Soo, for my ds106 blog, I decided to choose the theme called elegantWhite. It’s simple and clean, which I really like. In regards to the changes I made, I just took out the header photo because I didn’t like how it took up a majority of the page when you enter my blog. But other than that, I liked the colour and font of everything, so I kept a lot of its default settings. I just decided to add a few Plugins and Widgets such as Akismet (which I needed since I got sooo many spam comments already), JetPack, and Tag Cloud (thanks for the recommendation, Nancy!).

My Welcome Site

My welcome site is www.sarahpark.org. I still haven’t done too much with this page yet, since I’m not sure what I want to use it for. I choose the theme Gommero because I think I’m going to link other sites to this welcome site such as my ePortfolio and my personal blogs, as well as my ds106 blog. But I still don’t want to limit myself just yet, which is why I’m leaving this site alone until I can figure out what to do with it. Hopefully I’ll have this site fully developed by the end of this semester!

Daily Creates

This week, I did two daily creates. My first one was for January 22nd (located here), and the prompt was “Submit a favourite monologue from a movie with every third word taken out.” One of my favourite movies of all time is A Few Good Men. I saw it for the first time in high school during my senior Government class, and man, oh man, was I blown away by the famous “You Can’t Handle the Truth” monologue by Jack Nickolson. Here is a video of the famous scene:

Did that just give you the chills, or what?!

The second one I did was for January 25th (right over here), and the prompt was “Describe the sky in a single sentence without using colour words.” I ended up doing this daily create yesterday, but who cares! You can’t put a time frame on creativity, right? Anyways, I was inspired by this photo for this prompt. After reading my one sentence, can you tell I’m an English major?

GIF Assignment

Okay, so this one was a big toughie for me. I ran into so many different problems, probably because I didn’t read all of the instructions! At first, I was super overwhelmed with this assignment. Therefore, I did what anyone would do: I googled it. I found a lot of helpful tutorials… but it involved buying Adobe Photoshop.

Therefore, I went back to the GIF Assignment page and perused it rather than quickly glimpse at all of the details. Thank goodness I did! I ended up finding a very helpful site and found the programs I needed to complete this assignment. Lesson learned: READ EVERYTHING BEFORE STARTING AN ASSIGNMENT!

Aside from my eagerness, I ran into one other bump while doing this assignment. When I was trying to download the Youtube clip I was going to use (I wanted to use a scene from Girl, Interrupted), the converter I was using kept crashing! After a few more attempts, I decided to send an S.O.S via Twitter.

@sarahhpark2 Try pwnyoutube.com instead deturl.com Try a few of the video downloaders there #ds106

— Jim Groom (@jimgroom) January 27, 2013

Thanks to Professor Jim Groom and Professor Alan Levine, I was able to successfully get my Youtube clip, and complete the assignment with MPEG Streamclip and GIMP following the easy instructions on the site. Here’s the finished product:

BTW, if you haven’t seen Girl, Interrupted, go watch it on Netflix. It’s such a good movie, and shows how great of an actress Angelina Jolie is!

Reflection on Week 2

I can’t believe we’re 1/8 done with this semester! Anyways, despite all the issues I had with creating my GIF, I’m feeling a lot more confident using my blog. I guess I’m getting into the swing of things now?

But if it wasn’t for @cogdog and all of my fellow ds106er’s being so helpful via Twitter (no matter what time it is), I don’t think I would have been able to get this far already without throwing something at my computer screen!

I can’t wait to see what’s in store for us for week 3. Hope everyone stays warm, and see you guys next week!