February 23, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
8:57 PM (Pacific)
Yep, we have one of these on the side menu now:
Yep, it's an ad...it is the Amazon.com pic of the DVD for the fifth season of Angel. But, it is also an excuse to put up a pic of David Boreanaz and James Marsters. Had we not gotten the Amazon affiliation, what other excuse could I have invented to put two hunky guys on the side menu?
I'm actually watching the fifth season of Angel now. Hm. In some ways it is the best season of all. The only aspect that makes it not the best, is Cordelia (not enough of...). But then there is Spike.
grumble Good shows never last. They can't. Bad shows can continue almost indefinitely, or until the main actors drop dead. But good shows are lucky to last five years.
February 17, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
10:23 PM (Pacific)
Hmmm...thebroadroom has become...an ezine. A women's ezine. An online magazine, absolutely free of charge.
We have been a quarterly for quite some time actually. I just never wanted to say so. We have no corporate investors, ya know, all of the work on the site is done by us in our spare time. So I have had to push back the beginning of the quarter, pretty much every quarter.
But every quarter, we do have new stuff on the site. Hence we are an online women's quarterly magazine.
February 9, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
1:31 PM (Pacific)
Ugh--and I need to update our Cafepress tutorial. grumble...
Here's the basic info:
1.) Use the PNG format for all of your designs. It looks much, much better than JPG.
2.) Use the maximum DPI for all of your designs. Even if you're on dial-up, it's worth the hassle.
Imo it's better to use a smaller design at the maximum DPI than it is to use a bigger design at a lower DPI (some computers cannot handle large designs at max DPI).
3.) You can print out your design in the size you intend to use for the item...just get it to scale and send it to your computer printer.
Cut out the printed design and hold it up to your shirt or hat or what-have-you. It gives you a pretty accurate idea of how the finished item will look.
4.) Don't stress about the full-bleed designs; they're not that big a deal.
Actually I've been meaning to do that for a long time. I'm not happy with the design we have now. It doesn't represent the site.
February 3, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
4:50 PM (Pacific)
lol...I looked that up because I really was not sure myself, if, say, taking ideas from a public forum and presenting them on another forum, without crediting the source of those ideas, was or was not plagiarism.
I mean people swap ideas on forums all the time. I guess what disturbed me was the notion of taking many ideas from forum A, then presenting them on forum B (where presumably people have not read the content on forum A) as if the ideas were original, while at the same time badmouthing forum A on forum B...did that, aside from exhibiting an utter lack of class, constitute plagiarism...as opposed to, say, imitation as the sincerest form of flattery?
The answer appears to lie in crediting your source. The problem with this type of person is that eventually, they will not only take credit for your ideas, they will also (when fewer and fewer people remain who know the truth) begin to accuse you of copying them.
You know something...I never actually knew what was plagiarism, until recently.
I decided to look it up...what exactly is plagiarism?
Grammar
plagiarism
Literary theft. Plagiarism occurs when a writer duplicates another writer's language or ideas and then calls the work his or her own. Copyright laws protect writers' words as their legal property. To avoid the charge of plagiarism, writers take care to credit those from whom they borrow and quote.
Similar theft in music or other arts is also called plagiarism.
Lexicon
The noun plagiarism has 2 meanings:
Meaning #1: a piece of writing that has been copied from someone else and is presented as being your own work
Meaning #2: the act of plagiarizing; taking someone's words or ideas as if they were your own
Synonyms: plagiarization, plagiarisation, piracy
Wikipedia
plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to the use of another's ideas, information, language, or writing, when done without proper acknowledgment of the original source. Plagiarism is not necessarily the same as copyright infringement, which occurs when one violates copyright law. Like most terms from the area of intellectual property, plagiarism is a concept of the modern age and not really applicable to medieval or ancient works.
Definition
There is some difference of opinion over how much credit must be given when preparing a newspaper article or historical account. Generally, reference is made to original source material as much as possible, and writers avoid taking credit for others' work.
The use of mere facts, rather than works of creative expression, does not constitute plagiarism. It does not matter whether the facts come from public domain or copyrighted works. In fact, the issue of public domain works versus copyrighted works is irrelevant to the concept of plagiarism. For instance, it is legal for a student to copy several paragraphs (or even pages) of text from a public domain book, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and then directly add these quotations to his or her own paper. However if these quotations were not clearly identified as to his or her source, then the student would be guilty of plagiarism, using another writer's work as if it were his or her own. High schools, colleges and universities are especially sensitive to this kind of academic dishonesty, as many students claim that if an action is legal, it must be ethical. This is untrue. Most such institutions have academic codes of ethics which prohibit all forms of plagiarism, whether the idea is plagiarized from public domain or copyrighted sources.
Similarly, it is plagiarism to steal the specifics of someone else's novel idea, and then present it as one's own work. This type of plagiarism is rampant in high schools, colleges and universities, when students illicitly use the analyses in "Cliffs Notes", and falsely present them as being their own original analysis. A small market has emerged of web sites offering essays and papers for sale to students, while a counter-industry has developed of companies offering services for instructors to compare student's papers to a database of sources and search for potential plagiarism.
According to some academic ethics codes and criminal laws, a complaint of plagiarism may be initiated or proven by any person. The person originating the complaint need not be the owner of the plagiarized content, nor need there be any active or passive communication from a content owner directing that any investigation or discipline process be initiated in response to the plagiarism.
It is not plagiarism when two (or more) people independently come up with the same idea or analysis.
There is also accidental plagiarism. One case involved a boy whose mother had repeatedly read to him a story as a very small child. Later in life he was writing a story for an assignment, and a story 'came to him', but the story turned out to be exactly that which his mother had read to him as a small child, though he had no recollection of her reading it to him.
...
It seems that the common thread in these definitions is crediting the source of your information, much more than what kind of information it is or where it came from.
Okay...Angel...how the heck did Angel ever get cancelled? I see Charmed is still up. Charmed is...a clothes and makeup show. i.e. you'd watch it just to see how they did the makeup and what sort of clothes the women wore.
We're in the fifth and last season of Angel now...it just gets better and better and better. (shakes head)
Okay, now it's 98% of the screen...yeah...so I have to replace the text link with a leaderboard.
It may not be obvious, but this entire site was created using a Java compiler I got for $30 in 1998. It's a Java compiler...the Symantec one...it doesn't do HTML templates.
Ergo, changing the ads on the site involves a Java program I wrote myself. I suppose ultimately all of the pages on the site should be comprised of marker tags for the program...eh...the thing is this. thebroadroom is, on purpose, mostly an old-style HTML, text-based site.
I've thrown in some Flash because Coffee Cup was nice enough and smart enough, to have a promotion for their software; I got the Flash editor. We don't need Flash but we do need Flash...to modernize the appearance of the site.
You will note how slow I am to change the technologies that form the core of thebroadroom. i.e. the site has to run on older computers and even older browsers.
lol--not everyone thinks that way. Part of the concept of using stuff that works only on the newest-newest, is that obviously you filter out the people who can't afford the newest-newest.
That said, I have been turning it around in my mind to a.) stop babbling and get that leaderboard up and b.) replace the applet on the front page with Flash. sigh Haven't decided yet.
Okay...I can admit it. Having a text link to predict the Oscar winners for a chance to win a plasma tv probably is not as good for this site as having a leaderboard banner.
Hmmm...was this page always so narrow? brb
February 2, 2005
posted by Colleen Shirazi at
4:54 PM (Pacific)
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