80% Critique

Sarah

1. The purpose of this digital media is to inform people about Vocal Achord.
2. The media is well designed and the argument is obvious.
3. Some sort of color scheme would help to improve the overall presentation of the media.

Charles

1. Inform people about club indigo.
2. Nice design, well organized.
3. A little plain too "stock" feeling not much creativity with respect to information being displayed.

James

1. Inform people about online piracy, its consequences and statistics.
2. Well designed + informative designed.
3. Poor color choice, it feels awkward.

Cassandra

1. Inform people about greek like and its leadership opportunities.
2. Pretty nice , well thought out transitions.
3. Color of font is difficult to read sometimes and the presentation went way to fast.

This Project

Makes me want to cry.

I have never been so frustrated with a project in my life.

I would rather redo mushroom mapper all over again than do this project.
Every time I start I feel like I've already failed.
The first project I wanted to do was too risky, so I changed it and then I found that again that project was too complicated (Spend 5 minutes with Adobe Fireworks and tell me how you feel), and now I'm stuck doing something that I am less passionate about than I was at the start of this project. When I first heard about this project I was excited, enthusiastic even. Now I feel like blah. Blah is such a funny word, it describes the amount of work that I have actually been able to accomplish less a design plan on this project.
I figured turning to IRC for suggestions on what tactics are used in the hosting industry to scam people was a good idea, the community was actually very helpful  But once again, I risk repercussions and steeping on some powerful toes if I carry through with this.

I would like to think that this is one of those projects that I can just half ass but its not my style.
When it comes to something in my domain, the digital domain that is I feel like I have to put in 110% effort.
I have come to realize that I no longer know what I'm doing anymore in this class. I have never felt so stressed, rewarded and frustrated from a single class in my life. I used to work in an apple orchard, and the boss there used to get mad and throw things. Once while I was working making donuts he got some bad news and walked into my area, picked the tray up where the donuts were being laid after they fried and threw it across the room. He then looked at me and said "If you can make it here you can make it anywhere". That's how I feel about this class. I'm pushed to the point of breaking, just like I was at that job. I still don't even have 60% of my project done, and I still feel very confused, if anything at this school has made me really sit down and think about how my life and how things are going its this project...

Wysocki & Lynch, Chapter 3

In chapter 3 of Wysocki & Lynch we are presented with various strategies for effectively communicating a rhetorical situation. I visited the web page that the book suggested but I was unable to find anything of interest. The first few sections of chapter 3 basically explain that arguing is a social activity, and the purpose of an argument is generally to get someone(s) to modify their position on a particular subject. The purpose of an argument as supplied by Wysocki & Lynch is "shifting someone's level of belief in or adherence to a position or attitude: through argument". Now this might seem somewhat redundant, but based on the traditional idea of what an argument is "a statement, reason, or fact for or against a point" (link), Wysocki & Lynch's definition addresses the purpose more than the argument itself. 

Chapter 3 also talks about creating compositions to serve different purposes. For example: a composition that's main purpose is to communicate a particular argument may be different than a composition aimed at teaching others to learn. I have observed this difference myself many times. When was in Scientific and Technical communication here at Tech, I was required to create a design plan that taught someone how to do something. I picked creating a cheese quesadilla as my subject, I developed a design plan for it with the media being a paper and PDF instruction booklet. Now, for my business I use design plans all of the time when creating websites or applications. The way in which you present an informative website vs. the way you present an instruction set are very different. The main difference being when you produce an instruction set you have to take into account the audience's skill set, but with a website you only need to take in account the audience's ability to understand the material. This is similar to the concept of connecting audience, context and purpose in the reading.  For example how you communicate information to a audience of kids might differ greatly from how you would communicate the same information to a group of teenagers. Wysocki & Lynch explain in great detail about how audience profiling, and how when you create a production piece it is important to consider the audience's skill sets as well as their past experiences when trying to communicate a specific goal or idea to them. This would be extremely important to consider for example if you were communicating to children how to build a bird house from a kit, vs how you would build a bird house from scratch to adults.

All in all this reading was fairly informative, I already had a pretty clear understanding both in theory and practice of most of the concepts presented in this reading but I never knew the technical names or analysis for each of them so I feel more informed now.

Purpose Plan for Assignment #3

Statement Parts

Purpose:	I want to design a web page to create awareness about the filthy state of the plates, cups, and silverware used in the dining halls.
Audience:	The audience for this project is mainly potential students, as well as current students and their families. Secondary audiences will be Michigan Tech staff, and other people who happen to come by my web page.
Context:	Various dirty dishes that have been discovered in present time throughout breakfast - dinner will be examined, and photographed. The availability of dirty dishes could affect the outcome of this project as dirty dishes are hit or miss, but they are usually available all of the time.
Strategies:	Effective presentation of this argument will be completed by producing a web page that contains photographs, and time information about the frequency in which a dirty cup, plate or piece of silverware is encountered. I will create a timeline graphic of some sort to illustrate this information. I will go to the dining hall at 10:30 AM for Lunch, 12:30 PM for Post-Lunch and 5:30 PM For Dinner every day M-F in order to try and achieve some level of accuracy with my observations.
Medium:	The medium for my arrangement would be web based/digital media.
Arrangement:	The arrangement I have chosen to use for this project will be a simple web page layout consisting of simple three page design including a jQuery timeline. The entire site will not make heavy usage of gradients, and will be fairly quick to produce, as well as load for the user. The website content will be displayed similarly to the diagram below.
Ethos:	I will appear qualified to my audience because website will look professional, as well as effectively demonstrate my argument of how filthy the cups, plates, bowls, and silverware are in the dining halls. Since I have over 5 years of catering experience including washing dishes I will appear qualified to make this argument. In addition I am also a Michigan Tech student and that also makes my observations more valuable as it is coming from a first person student point of view.
Pathos:	I feel that my target audience (prospective Michigan Tech students) will feel more informed about the state of the dining halls here at Michigan Tech and therefore will be able to determine if dorm living is right for them, in addition if the university hears about my observations maybe they will attempt to do something about this problem.
Logos:	I have washed dishes for 5 years at a professional catering facility, I know what it takes to properly clean dishes, this in conjunction with my observations should be sufficient evidence to prove that the dishes on campus are terribly maintained.

Copyright

When it comes to the discussion of copyright it comes to a point where the discussion leads to nowhere. Even though corporations and individuals claim copyright on their creations for originality, are they really original? When analyzing these copyrighted works it is important to realize that to copyright something you are really only copyrighting the particular way that the author has expressed themselves. Under the "fair use" policy which is defined as the "various purposes for which the reproduction of a particular work may be considered fair, such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research." (U.S Copyright Office) anyone can effectively examine, alter or use a portion of a copyrighted work as long as it does not actually infringe (copy the expression exactly) on another's work.  The concept of what makes a work original, whether it be a specific attribute, a context or a idea create a unique problem set for anyone wishing to protect their "original" ideas and thus creates a plethora of problems usually only solvable by litigation.

In the reading there was a pretty clear that the goal was to dissuade students from copying materials outright. This includes not properly citing sources and copying content outright. I remember when I was in high school the plagiarism was so bad one year that we actually had to all go to the gymnasium for a special school wide event to discuss the consequences of it, and how to avoid it. Students in my class just outright copied each other verbatim usually without little resistance from most of the teachers. The though process was that if everyone did it then there's no way that the school would discipline everyone. I see this attitude lots of times online, people will outright copy blog postings of others and publish them as their own. This is especially evident on technology blogs.

This reading was pretty informative on how to avoid copyright issues, I find a lot of the things it has to offer relevant to my business profession of web design as well. All in all this was a pretty decent and well structured reading.

Leveraged Buyouts In Web Hosting

"Get your piece of the web" or some form of this saying is often used by web hosts to try and lure potential customers in. Whether a web host is targeting small business or individuals though television ads, web banners, or other forms of advertisement. The message is always the same, "pick us". In this day and age it is important for small business and individuals alike to have some form of web presence.

Web hosts often try to make the idea of having one's own website for personal use attractive by promoting ideas that personal websites are hip and fun. This formula for success has been repeatedly implemented over and over again, from small hosts to large hosts. The idea that cheaper is better has driven the idea that service at cheaper prices is acceptably worse than service at higher prices. In today's web hosting industry it is war, brand warfare at its best, a flurry of DDOS attacks, slander campaigns and leveraged buyouts. When companies go bust, and the money dries up larger web hosts absorb smaller ones, clients are treated like stock; exchanged and traded at will. Enter the world of the underground stock exchange, a monopoly of sorts where there are no rules. It is ruthless, the competitors are despicable and anything goes, enter the world of web hosting.

I first got started in web hosting in late 2008, I had just started at Michigan Tech and had designed my first website for a customer. The customer was a business which specialized in breeding German Shepard guard dogs.  After finalizing a design for the website it became apparent that the customer was unable to host his own website due to the lack of ability and time, so I decided to research website hosting. A quick Google search led me to WHT (Web Hosting Talk) which is a forum dedicated to all things web hosting. After a few hours of browsing I found a thread on starting a web hosting business. The advice that the thread had to offer was simple, use cPanel, find cheap reseller hosting, get a billing system, and build a website to advertise. I followed the instructions exactly, and in the end I found a company offering a cPanel based reseller plan for $5.00 /month. Immediately after singing up with the web host I started to experience problems, there was a language barrier for starts apparently the owner of the company and the sole employee lacked the appropriate technical skills to help me. This made getting any sort of help nearly impossible. I was desperate to find a new host and fast.

In a completely unrelated string of events I discovered the ability to geo-locate where domain names end up. I decided to try and locate the domain name of the host I was using and it turned out that from that location I was able to determine that they themselves were a reseller of a larger company who had even better prices. Armed with this new knowledge I decided to make the switch to the new company.

Signing up for the new company was easy (it always is), I simply selected which package I wanted from their extremely well designed website, payed with Paypal and was instantly emailed my details, however due to some bug in their system, my account was never created and thus I had to email support. My first impressions of this new company was that they knew what they were doing, they were polite professional and prompt. After a few minutes of explaining that I was a customer of one of their resellers they moved my account off of the resellers account and transferred it to theirs. They helped me with the issues the original host couldn't resolve all the while maintaining a friendly and professional attitude.

After spending countless hours and days fine tuning my own company website advertising my new reseller hosting, I received an email. It read like this "because you no pay your bill, your account will be deleted". I was confused, I checked my invoices, everything was paid, what was this?

What did I just read?

"The Rhetorical Situation" is a intriguing piece of writing which pushes the boundaries of ones ability to concentrate on the reading as the author exposes new almost scientific explanations for why rhetorical interactions happen and how to analyze them.

The underlying meanings of this piece revolve around the concept of what rhetorical situations are and how to analyze them. Throught this reading I found myself relating the concepts presented to those that I encountered in Logic and Critical Thinking. The ability to analyze these arguments and situations are vitally important to being successful when it comes to properly responding in a situation. The ability to illustrate how one feels about these situations through a rhetorical approach is also briefly explained.

I feel that the majority of the points presented in this piece could be potentially overwhelming for most people and therefore I am interested to see how the debriefing on Tuesday goes.