Applied Technology

ACA-IS-HERE :: Study Spanish in New Mexico

Here is a website I made for a friend. It is not great but it was fun and I learned a bit of CSS along the way. The studio where I work makes a great deal of Sites and I am usually involved in some aspect. I don't often create or design the Sites unless they are Flash based but I often create Flash content for them. I am sometimes called upon to edit some HTML but it is not my main duty.

I can create Sites from scratch if I need to. I have registered domains for people, set up their hosting, created Sites and managed them too. Not my favortie thing to do but I imagine I'll need to stay proficient.

I have been and will continue to do more recording and editing of digital audio. It is essential for my job. I create animations and interactive multimedia using Flash. Our small studiodoes not have dedicated staff to the creation of all the audio needed for some of our complex projects. Also, it is sometimes near impossible to find the "perfect" royalty free audio. We have to create what we need and contracting out is also not an option for many projects.

We have the equipment and the software. I just need more practice. I will be getting alot of that over the next few years I'm sure.

I do not like spreadsheets. I respect them and those that know how to use them. I am an artist. I don't want to know about the financial stuff. This, I know is not wise. I ought to know the basics and be comfortable with managing the accounts, creating budgets, and using Excel to keep track of all sorts of data. It creates useful graphs and you can use formulas to do all the calculations. It is fantastic.

I still don't like it and will likely not use it in my career if I can help it. Who knows where my career will take me. I have probably just jinxed myself and before I can say how much I hate Excel again, I will be working on a multi-sheet document and cursing my fate.

I think I might keep pluging away at it. I will someday take a Branch class in it.

Powerpoint is a very useful tool. It is fairly easy to use and is more or less universally available. I have used it many times for educational and professional applications. I have used it to make many presentations and found it to be essential in many respects because it is the standard.

I do not have my own laptop anymore and find that if I must give a presentation I must create it (or at least export it) in PPT because that is what will be available to me. I prefer to use Keynote - Apple's presentation creation software. It is easier to use and the end product is typically more appealing. A nice feature of the software is that it exports well to PPT format. The end product needs to be well tested though because PPT does not support some of the animation that Keynote can create and some of the graphics and text might be out of alignment.

I know this is not the best solution but it works for me and in fact I must get working on a presentation for an upcoming conference.