Jingle Jangle Write a jingle about a product that you like and then use your imagination. Extra points if you use an instrument. Rice and Beans So for our radio show, my group and I created a world in post-zombie-apocalypse. You should seriously check it out. But that’s a separate post. When I stumbled across ...

May I Take Your Order? Using your best accent (whether it be Australian, British or southern, etc), pretend you are at McDonald’s and order something off of their menu. Be picky! For example, a coke with no ice. *shudder* Yup. I pretty much sucked at this.  I HATE listening to my own voice.  Have I ...

Imitate Some Weather Using only your voice and things within arm’s reach of your computer, imitate some kind of weather. It doesn’t have to be long, but make it sound as real as possible.   I blame the suck of this on the limitations within the instructions on the project.  It hurts me to post ...

Make ‘em Laugh! Find a good, brief joke in a language other than your mother tongue; if you don’t know any other languages this might be a good way to start learning. Record your voice telling the joke focusing on pronunciation and try to make it sound as natural as you can with appropriate vocal ...

This assignment is called ‘Wait, where’d that guy come from?‘  And in the current day and age, how could I possibly resist putting poor Obama in front of who knows how many NRA advocates?  I couldn’t quite get the layers to work right for this one, so I instead erased the surroundings of Obama’s head ...

All of my design assignments this week were found through clicking the Random button on the assignment repository pages.   Not that I did every assignment I came across.  I pretty much just clicked, waited a minute to see if I had inspiration, and clicked again if I didn’t, or got to work if I ...

This is from the design assignment called Re-brand ‘em.  I took the advice from underconsideration.com and simplified the logo a bit.  Since Micron uses circular wafers, I incorporated the circular shape of those into the colors Micron generally likes to use for their products.  I made an oval shape and filled it and made that ...

  My defamation of my good buddy Winston here is in honor of the True Lies Design Assignment.  Churchill is way too easy to pick on, really.  My honest opinion of him is that he was one of the awesomest, most intelligently sarcastic yet effective world leaders ever (or at least ever documented).  But I ...

(we’re going on a bear hunt) This week, to introduce us to various design elements, ds106 students were sent on a Design Safari!  We were given lots of examples and definitions of various design elements, and then told to keep a look out for these elements in action throughout the week. The very first one ...

This week, my teammates and I met in Dupont Hall on UMW‘s campus to continue working on our radio show.  Haley took the reins for the overall scripting of the show, and Daniel made sure he had the audio recording while all of us together just brainstormed our way through the original format we’d put ...

Monday was World Vegetarian Day.  The assignment was to make a photo that celebrates the holiday. This photo is the embodiment of my discovery of Aviary.  And what a beautiful thing it is!!!  I had a blast learning to use Aviary, and I love the results.  I really felt that the fakeness of the colors ...

Oops. I didn’t realize I’d saved this as a draft and never published it. *facepalm* I am so awesome. But here we go, in its full glory – MY PHOTOBLITZ!!! *obnoxious cheering noises* 20 minutes, 10 photos, 5 ladies, 1 beautiful winery – CAN we do it?! Oh heck yes. When I read the ds106 ...

What a week!!  I had a lot of fun going over the resources and assignments this week in ds106, as always.  I read through the assignment post long before I began the actual assignments, and also read through the advice provided through the links there on how to improve your photography skills. Admittedly, I am ...

This one baffled me a bit.  I feel like maybe I’ll have to take this down before long.  Is there something wrong with this assignment page itself? The assignment here was to make an album cover, finding your band name, album name, and base cover photo by way of random url generators on wikipedia, flickr, ...

My kids. The trees.  Everything.  Except for that bench.  It’s so much smaller than I remember! Once upon a time, my kids were nowhere close to being able to reach the ground on this bench.  When we took this picture, Justin and I had barely been together for a few months (if that). This was ...

  This visual assignment is ‘Art Comes to Life.’  The assignment is to recreate a famous painting in a real-life photo, and represents three out of my 10 stars this week. To try to capture the essence of the Mona Lisa, I did some research on what was so special about the painting, anyway.  I ...

Come on.  Tell me you’ve never wished you had your very own unicorn.  Just try. You’d be lying, right?  And if yo’ mama raised you right, you can’t tell a lie, right? Right. In case you’re just tuning in here, Saturday of this week was my Sissy’s birthday.  Around these parts, that’s *kinda* a big ...

Monday Somebody around me is making music??  Well, of course they are!  If we were to create a family crest, music notes, and perhaps some sort of instrument, would be MUSTS.  Music is a HUGE part of who we are as a family.  Unfortunately, this was posted on a day when I would be gone ...

Aw, geez, you mean you want me to say that I like something that I made?? Alright, I’ll try to at least decide what’s the best of my stuff, compared to the rest of my own stuff.  I guess I can do that. Being a little bit on the OCD side of life, I love ...

This past Friday was Field Trip Day for my son and I.  We were both pretty excited.  It was time to go play with some other homeschoolers and have a bunch of fun and whatnot.We were only going to a park to play and take pictures, but still.  It was something different, and we were ...

Sunday night, as ds106 students around the globe (okay, maybe just the graded students in and around Fredericksburg, VA) experienced the unthinkable: a ds106 site CRASH, with only an hour to go before the submission deadline for the week’s assignments. OH NOES!! @crystalrose0784 no our server sucks. you are teh awesome — Alan Levine (@cogdog) ...

It’s Friday night.  Both kids are gone.  I’m home alone, and hubby is just getting off of work. Holy cow, a night to ourselves?! What is this?!  What should we do??? I know!  How about if we brought home pizza (thank you, Dominos, for offering GF pizza), wine, beer, and ice cream, change into sweats, ...

Having completed the audio assignment to create an audio bumper for ds106 radio, the idea of trying to create a 5-sound story was no longer nearly so daunting.   The hardest part, really, was trying to decide what kind of story I wanted to tell. I decided to tell a story about  nature, and ultimately ...

This week, I took a dive into the big, fat, hairy, scary world of DIGITAAAAAAL AUDIO-DIO-DIO-dio-dio. Seriously, having completed the assignments from this week, I’m starting to feel like there’s nothing I can’t do anymore. This was my Everest. This was my frozen-with-fear, never-gonna-make-it-over-this mountain. But I totally did it. And believe it or not, ...

So, you want me to make noises?  With a computer? Scary, scary stuffs.  But okay. Actually, in all honesty, this was pretty fun.  I don’t know how my bumper ended up creepy, but that was the vibe I was getting, so I went with it. In my class this week, as we focus on digital ...

Say it isn’t so!! Tell me I didn’t miss some assignments from the Daily Create this week! *sigh* It’s a sad, sad week.  When I heard the professors mention, I think during Week 1 or 2, that usually some history paper or other will come along and take their students’ attention away from ds106 a ...

So, I’ve tuned in to ds106 radio a few times before, but never for quite as long as I did today. Okay, so honestly, last time I listened, it was because my husband had turned it on from his laptop, and I overheard it.    It was pretty timely, too.  He and I had just ...

As I mentioned in a recent post, I recently listened to my first episode of This American Life – specifically, the story of a little 4-year-old boy who went missing in a Louisiana swamp in 1912 named Bobby Dunbar. As instructed by my professors in my super-awesome online class, ds106, I listened to the story ...