This weekend I went down to florida to see my girlfriend. She picked me up from the airport Saturday night and cooked dinner together. On sunday she showed me around her apartment complex and where she works which were both amazing. We mostly just hung out, but it was really nice to be in warm Palm Beach with her.

She had to work on Valentines Day, so I spent the day planning a romantic evening. I kidnapped her from work and took her to the beach. We had a picnic at sunset on the beach. I made a spinach salad with strawberries, raspberries, sliced almonds, and raspberry vinaigrette. Topped with a red raspberry chicken. We had wine and watched the waves crash on the beach while the sunset behind us. It was the perfect way to celebrate Valentines Day.

I have to say it was extremely hard to leave and come back to the cold tundra of Muncie, IN.

I have spent quite a bit my time this week playing around in the studio and doing some still life pictures that I have wanted to do for a while.

The Krakken Rum was inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean,  which happened to be on TV the other night.

The monster can is actually an idea I have had for a while. I cut my hands up pretty bad trying to punch out the M. Then i came up with a much better way to do it. it took me quite a bit of time to get this close to right. 

The final picture is just me playing around with light painting. I always love doing, so I went to walmart and bought glow sticks and LED lights!

So this was my second attempt at home made chili in my life. Me being a bears fan and my roommate being a Pats fan I thought it would be a great day for making a really large vat of Chili. I got the basic parts of the recipe from foodnetwork.com. Then improvised the rest. I loved the colors of these onions and peppers simmering.

I have to say that the end result was a delicious chunky chili, that I will definitely build upon in the future. I served it with the proper mountain of cheese on top!

Bears won!!!

Overall a pretty decent day!

I have decided to completely repurpose his blog. I have never really posted a whole lot on here but I’m planning to now. This will now be used to chronicle my adventure from being a college student to hopefully a professional photographer.

I think that Tufte would be very critical of this presentation because of the use of PowerPoint.  While the speaker uses a very zen style presentation, there are parts of it that are really bad. The speaker has a bad tendency of reading straight off of the PowerPoint presentation, while it somewhat works, there is a much more visual way to do this. Instead of reading, the speaker could have used pictures. The presentation zen idea would also disagree with the presentations design. The speaker uses bad clip art and ill designed slides to represent things that have potential to be better designed.

I would say that this is definitely a presentation and not just a speech. While the majority of the information that is presented is in the talk; the speaker uses visuals to help make his information more memorable and more easily understood. The use of the presentation is very effective and really helps to accentuate his speech. This makes it a presentation and not just a speech.

I first saw this presentation in my entrepreneurship class. I was instantly impressed by this professor, because of his courage and obscure method of reaching out to his students. He sang this song on the last day of class to help inspire his students. The Professor actually took the time to write an entire song for his students.

The first thing this professor had to think about to give this presentation successfully was identifying his audience. This was not hard, because the class was an entry-level entrepreneurship class. This meant that the majority of his students were college freshman.  I would say that the type of audience for which he was presenting was a large influence on the genre of music that picked to do his presentation. He used a classic song that most of the students would probably know. The original song was kind of a funny and entertaining song to begin with.

Another important factor that made this presentation interesting was the words that he used to replace the original words. The professor had to rewrite the entire song, and still make it pertain to his topic of trying to appreciate his class and inspire them to continue on with their schooling. He did a good job of making the entire thing relate back to his original subject.

The professor also did a good job of keeping his audience not only interested but also interactive in his presentation. Through out the entire song, he points out certain students and talks about them personally. He also gets his students to sing along during the parts of the song that repeat themselves. You can hear all of his students in the background laughing and singing along during the entire song.

The last thing that really made this presentation great is the uniqueness of the presentation style. It is not very often that a professor raps for the class. Normally professors stand in the front of class and flip through PowerPoint presentations, it is extremely odd to have a professor rap in class. Because of the uniqueness and the presentation style I would give this presentation my seal of approval.