Mirror of Thoughts

This post is a reflection on my blog since I started blogging! It was something new for me a whole other way to share my thoughts in a better way. I learned a lot from my experience and I hope that I taught someone something as well. It was like being in thought mode another whole new mode in a game that you are playing the game of life. I’ve always spent a lot of time think of what to write about and I always wanted something new; something that no one else has done before so that I can enjoy my blogging experience to the maximum. I achieved a lot of stuff through my blog that I never expected myself to be able to achieve and I was successful in what I achieved that is why i’ll try as much as I could to keep blogging at least twice a month even if this school year is over.

What did I learn from my blog?

I learned how to write to an audience that can reply to you with their comments and thoughts on what you wrote and interact with you and this is my first time actually writing for an audience because all the essays we do in school are just directed toward no one and the feedback we get on them doesn’t really help us improve as writers, in my opinion, teachers just check them but they never tell you what you need to work on. On the other hand, blog posts can help you get better feedback from a wide community. I also learned how important pictures are, how to choose pictures to put on the blog, various styles of writing and techniques to improve posts #thinkingtuesdays. I also learned patience as many times I made posts that didn’t get views at all but hopefully they would someday. I learned how to think in a broader way rather than focusing on addressing a specific audience, I learned how to use the right tags and a lot more and More and MORE.

What worked for me is what I expected to work the least I wrote this one post about evolution of communication, it was one of my first posts that i thought was horrible, and i still get views on it until this day. I never expected a post to get that much views alone. Like seriously this post gained more views than all my other posts combined for some reason. I think it is luck. People say it because of my last name that I get views from all over the world, however, I don’t have my last name on the blog and I never posted it. I’m really proud that all these countries decided to visit my blog. Currently I have 80+ countries that visited my blog thanks to that one random magical post that I once made. I’m really curious to know though are the rest of my posts worse than that one? or is it just that the audience interested in the communication topic more? I really don’t know.

What I would do differently next time is probably share my blog out more and try to improve my topics to make them more interesting for people that is what I’m planning on doing for my very next post to find a topic that interest people a lot. My advice for next year bloggers is to ALWAYS TAG their posts that is how they get the views because no tagging equals no views. I tagged every single post since I started blogging never missed one. That is why I started off strong by receiving eight likes on my very first post. I would also advice them to share more and do something interesting that people at school need for example I made a resources page for my fellow classmates of AP European History before the AP test and they were actually useful resources that led people to check my blog more often during this week of AP testing. It was a very smart move, I need to confess it.

I think maybe for next year Mr. Theriault you can have like a day every two weeks where the whole class just brainstorms ideas for blogging so that when they go to the computer lab they wouldn’t be stuck in thinking like I was. I really think discussing several ideas where each student adds an idea would be awesome because the students would be more eager to check their Reader more often and visit each other blogs as well. 

At last I would like to thank you for giving us that blogging experience during high school as it might help us now and later in our lives where we can enter the global conversation!!

Technology For Children: Is it good or bad?

Throwback to childhood whenever I was bored I used to play Lego and pick up my nose, no just kidding. When I was young I actually used to love watching Tom and Jerry that I can almost recall every single episode if I watch like the first five minutes. I also used to play with Lego, make puzzles, or mostly play with my sister random board games or do any activity outside the house. It wasn’t that bad. We had fun together and enjoyed our time in a simple easy way. They were good days, however, now all that is gone.

What does the life of a child consist of now? All the parents nowadays should know specially those who work because their children are not provided with enough supervision. The child’s life consists of Video games, eating, TV and maybe some studying. I got a phone, used by both of parents before me, when I was in seventh grade and I was as happy as a clam until I realized I was so behind in technology that as soon as I got a Sony Ericsson phone the Samsung Galaxy S3 came out and it spread so quickly. I remember seeing my friends playing the game Subway Surfers, which was popular at the time and I couldn’t play it because my phone was not smart enough. Although I was sad at the time, I’m happy now.

Enough talking about myself and lets take that to another perspective, a worldwide perspective. Is technology beneficial for children? I don’t think that technology is god or bad but it depends on how each individual uses it, for how long and for what task. These days children are just given ipads with like 70+ games and subscription to a Cable TV including cartoon channels and that is all what they need to survive. This is extremely dangerous and when it is time for the child to enter school they will be inactive, unsociable and won’t be able to use their brains properly because all what they are going to be thinking about in class is “I can’t wait to show my friends the new high score I got yesterday after playing for four hours straight!” Well hopefully that is not what they are thinking about. I know some kids that are so obsessed with their ipad that they need to take it with them even to the car. That is getting too common and extensively unhealthy.

There are several alternatives to using the ipads as a tool of entertainment. I understand that it might be hard for a lonely child to have fun by themselves in the house while their parents are busy with work, however, I believe it would be easier for a lonely child to have more fun by himself rather than a child who has siblings because if we suppose that they didn’t have their ipads, I know it is hard for them but let’s just suppose they had a tool consisting of a set of colors paper and other materials this is going to open their imagination and opening imagination leads to creation and there is nothing better than having your own creation that makes you proud of yourself and your abilities. What are you going to benefit from getting a high score in a game. Nothing. This is not something that you created as a child that you should be proud of because someone is going to beat this score and you are going to forget about it before your friends do. 

Technology can harm young children by damaging their eyesight from a young age, causing them to be socially awkward when they grow up because of their isolation at home and making it harder to focus on studying when you are so addicted to a game, I mean not only young kids do that but also high school students and sometimes even adults are addicted to games. It is how much control parents posses over their children that determines a child future because I see some parents that just give their phones to young children so that they can play whenever they are bored or whenever they start crying. It is just so sad how children are regretting nature more and more often. It is the earth that grows a man:

If you had never tried digging in the sand how are you going to plant,

If you had never fixed a toy how will you be a skillful boy,

If you had never tried playing basketball how are you going to get tall,

If you skip your chance, you will never have it again.

These lines may sound stupid but they actually make a point if you never participate in any sports, events or activities and just stayed at home setting your mind on laziness mode you will never achieve anything and will just stay like that your whole life so that is why i’m addressing children because they still have a chance to change. Don’t feel like you are going to be super bored without phone, you might be bored a little bit but there is always something for you to do.

Living without a phone until the end of sixth grade actually taught me a lot of lessons like patience because I wanted the phone impatiently that i kept bugging my parents with it at least twice a week. They just wanted me to focus on studying more than playing and wasting my time and they did the right choice. I learned that nothing is necessary except when it is needed some people think that if they didn’t buy this shirt or this jacket today that the store is going to run out, close forever or disappear, maybe even if they don’t need it now they just but it for their friend’s birthday coming up in nine months. New things will come out fashion comes out and spreads too quickly and I learned tons of lessons that I might know or might not know about because sometimes we learn thing but we don’t really know where we learned them from. 

The Photoshop Bummer

A new renting system is replacing buying the products of Adobe and that is totally pissing me off right now. Photoshop is a popular and well known among people photo-editing program by Adobe. It is a very good program that you can use for retouching skin, changing background, cleaning up images, adding text effects and a lot more. Despite all these advantages people don’t purchase the program either because they believe it is difficult to use or is too expensive, and both reasons are true. The difficulty issue can be easily resolved by taking Photoshop courses which can be found all over the internet and on YouTube where there several awesome Photoshop tutorials for beginners and if you don’t have enough time there are quick Photoshop tutorials. Photoshop Lightroom is another good program used for photo-editing.

And this takes us to the next issue the money, for the last couple of years Photoshop cost about $600 to install the program on your computer which is very expensive so lately Adobe released a new system for selling their products called Creative Cloud. Instead of purchasing Photoshop, Lightroom and all the other Adobe programs separately they made a leasing system where you pay $50 a month for all products or $20 a month for only one product. The total number of products is thirteen products. People reacted differently to these news.

Some people saw advantages to this decision while others found disadvantages to upgrading Photoshop. The great advantage was absolutely for adobe because before applying this system their products were being pirated all over the internet which of course led to some loss in money because if you see something available for free, you would never think about buying it for $600 or above. However, some people paid money and didn’t know it was piracy, that is how much adobe Photoshop is widely spread all over the internet. There are many ways to avoid Photoshop piracy, but people don’t want to spend a huge amount of money on only one product.

What are other alternatives to using Photoshop? There are a lot of many other companies that are developing easy to use softwares for photo-editing like picmonkey, retrica, and several photo-editing apps that are available on the Google Play Store or App Store. These programs are helpful if you are in a rush but personally I believe that Photoshop is better if you are trying to do perfect work because you can do more with it. Every photographer knows how important Adobe program are for daily use and I bet that no photographer works and publish his picture without using Photoshop or Lightroom. I’m currently using Photoshop CS4 and it is working good for me and i’m not planning on upgrading it anytime soon.

That is a list of photography apps that are available for iphone and android, these can be used as quick alternatives to Photoshop to download on your mobile devices on the go.