zach whalen's blog

This is it. Grades are due to the registrar this afternoon, and with that, this semester, my first at UMW, will be officially concluded. I thought I'd use this occasion to post a blog entry here summing up what I think I've learned so I can put some perspective on what has been a truly momentous few months -- both personally, and professionally.

They say that having a baby changes everything. I don't know if that's true, but for me anyway, having a baby is a lot cooler than knowing you're going to have a baby soon but having to wait for her. It is pretty amazing to see her grow and start (already) turning into a little person. Cool little girl.  read more »

On Friday, there will be a quiz covering This is Not a Game and our conversation so far about ARGs. On that quiz, there will be an opportunity for extra credit, which you can receive if you correctly solve this puzzle. Not only will this get you some practice at puzzle-solving, this puzzle is appropriate since it appeared within a Dave Szulborski game.

The attached images are two sides of the same document, and it contains an encoded message. Everything you need to break the code is on this certificate.

To get you started, here's a copy of the printed text on the front side:  read more »

For our activity in Second Life, click here!

In class today, I gave you all a quick intro on using CSS to make your website designs easier to navigate. I want to use this blog entry to give you a few more thoughts and provide some links resources.

The first question you may be asking is, "OK, so what colors should I use?" Good question, I say! There are lots of websites out there which will try to answer that for you. I like COLOURlovers.com. They provide tons of color palettes, uploaded and commented on by users, and then they feature the ones that people like a lot. It's helpful to see the color pairings they come up with, and it's easy to imagine how your page might look with them applied.

To use one of their palettes, let's say, "No reception", scroll down the page and look at the information under each color block. What you want is the 6-digit hexadecimal code for each color. In this case, that's #87683B, #20334F, #F2BC3D, #C4412D, and #E66767.  read more »

Welcome to the course website for ENGL 376MM New Media: The Virtual and the False, a Fall 2008 course at the University of Mary Washington.

This website is the main hub for information and online interaction relative to this course. Here you can consult the syllabus, review the assignments and, most importantly, post blog entries. You can also add links (which will go in the class library and images.  read more »