Favre Is God

Today was a pretty uninteresting day. When I arrived, Anne the coordinator of the career and college center was printing a ton of stuff so I helped her keep everything organized and kept the chaos at the printer to a minimum. After we were done printing probably over 100 pages we stapled everything together and organized them into to different piles. For some reason there wasn't very many kids coming in and out of the career and college center today so there was not a whole lot of interaction on that level. However I did help one girl find some financial aid forms and told her a couple of websites to visit for scholarships. It probably was not very busy due to the fact that it is the end of the year and most students have already decided on where they want to go to college and or have career options lined up. After I assisted the one student I helped Anne enter information in the computer by reading off names to her. This was probably least enjoyable days of my volunteer experience because there was very little interaction with the kids.

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The first presentation I saw in discussion was a project based off of a website which I thought was an interesting concept. Not only did they have a website they also provided a well designed booklet to advertise their website and hopefully get more visitors and spread the knowledge that they have discovered. This groups project was about the millennium goal, which focused on ensuring environmental stability throughout the world. They talked about topics like decreasing or use of fossil fuels and ways to reduce the 2.2 million tons of electronic waste that there is in the world. I was amazed by the amount of electronic waste we have, 2.2 million tons, where does all of that waste go. They also spoke about the need for large-scale “green� renovations throughout the world. This renovations included things like using energy efficient appliances, having a personal garden, wearing bamboo clothing, use of bio-fuels and hybrid cars. The one that I found most interesting was having your own personal garden. I liked this idea a lot because it seems pretty simple and it also decrease the amount of chemicals and pesticides used by massive farms, which in turn improves the quality of our environment in so many ways.

The next presentation/topic I found interesting was the group that focused on millennium goal one which was eradicating extreme poverty and hunger. I liked this group’s idea of improving areas of extreme poverty by improving their social infrastructure via the use of a radio. I thought this was interesting because radio use seems so primitive that you don’t think it could possibly work. But when you think about it the areas of extreme poverty have poor education levels and radio use is a very simple technology for them to understand. Once the begin learning how to perfect the use of radio they can move on to better technology more complex forms of communication and technology. Even though we think computer use and technology is simple this may not be true in other cultures and we have to keep this fact in mind. Sometimes simple is better and if their culture moves on to better more complex technology in the future that’s great but simple technology may be the first step in this process. I liked the idea of Radio use because it’s extremely versatile and adaptable to the needs of different cultures and economies but in the end it improves a cultures social infrastructure and makes communicating and spreading knowledge easier and more efficient which in turn will hopefully improve the economic well being of that society or culture.

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Today was probably the most fun I had volunteering all semester. I was given the opportunity to design several different signs for a career and college fair that South High was hosting. I enjoyed doing this because it allowed me to be creative and plus a lot of students helped me and the signs turned out really cool. I liked this day the most so far because it was less serious than most of the days. Most days I am working with students and helping them decide basically the rest of their lives which is a pretty serious topic. Today was different because I got to kick back and have some fun with the kids.

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I really liked these face images I found on flickr so I decided to make another random title page, I think it's pretty cool.
Download file

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This is my last title page I worked on but my favorite which is why I put it first. I think I like it better because instead of just shape I used some interesting images I found on the internet and I like it a lot. I modified some of the images and the text in Adobe Illustrator to make them look a little more interesting.
Download file

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Look for and document some examples of presentation/documentation styles that your term project may take as inspiration.

I liked this design for possibly a website or print document. I liked how the title was separated from the text and how you could possibly have both a title and a subtitle with this layout. Also I liked the pictures on the right hand side and the sizing of the pictures fits well and flows well with the text.

I liked the use of contrasting colors. I don’t think I would use this for the layout of the whole document obviously but I think it would be interesting to shrink it down and use the same kind of styling for a heading possibly or run it vertically on the left or right side. I just thought this was a cool design in general.

I thought that this was a nice simple design that you could do some interesting things with. In the part of document where there is a money symbol you could put a picture on each page in the same way. Also I liked the black contrasting with the white for the heading because it really catches your attention. I would possible shrink that down and put it in the corners and use it for page number or subtitling on each page.

Here are some other designs that I found interesting and could possibly find some inspiration in.

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Today when I arrived like Anne promised there was a classroom full of over twenty kids working on the computers in the Career Center. I enjoyed this because I got to work hands on with the kids and didn’t have to file cabinets for multiple hours. Today the kids were working on filing out a Myers-Brigg survey and a skill inventory that would help to tell them what kind of personality types they had and what skills they were best at. These surveys can be very helpful because they tell you what kind of jobs you may be interested in which can be really useful in selecting a major that you want to pursue. This is helpful because if you know what kind of major you want to pursue in high school then you can pick a college that you know specializes in what your trying to learn. After helping the kids with their surveys. I went around the school and posted signs for a career and college fair that was coming up. I really enjoyed volunteering today because I felt like I was really helping the kids and giving them useful advise that they can use in the future when selecting what college they want to attend or what career they want to pursue in life.

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Explore through image and text how the built environment affects (supports or
detracts) who you are. Speculate in terms of frameworks, clockworks, phenomena and
oppositions.

The built environment both supports and detracts from my life and effects who I am on a daily basis. It detracts from my life in various ways. The built environment that I have lived in for the last year that I call my house is old which causes many problems for my roommates and I and has effected who we are and how we act towards each other. Some of my roommates like to go to bed early and are relatively quiet. Others in my house are loud and like to stay up late watching TV and listening to music. I happen to fall into the second category and since our house is old and the walls are thin lets just say sound travels easily throughout the entire place.

This has caused the people in our house who like to go to bed early and be quiet to hate the group of people who like to stay up late and be loud. This affects my life and who I am because the poor design and construction of my house has caused people to dislike me. This effects me and who I am because the people you are friends with and interact with make you who you are. If my house would have designed and built better I may have become better friends with the other people in my house and I may have a completely different group of friends that I interact with. That being said if my house was built better I may be a completely different person than I am right now. My house houses poor construction has caused the quiet people below me and my friends to dislike us for one single quality that we happen to have. Just because we enjoy listening to loud music and stay up late doesn’t mean that we can’t be friends with them. The built environment that I live in has prevented me from getting to know a group of people who could possibly change my life and who I am.

The built environment also effects who I am because of the house that I grew up in was a huge part of my life and I have a lot of great memories in that house. Unlike the house that I live in now I feel that the house that I grew up in was well designed and supported who I am. The house I grew up in had an awesome computer room/study that helped me get the good grades I did in high school, which enabled me to become a student here at the University of Minnesota and hopefully one day become an architect. Without that built environment I may be a completely different person today. I could be working at McDonalds full time right now instead of typing this blog right now. I could be living in a van down by the river eating a steady diet of government cheese.

That one room could have been the most important room in my life. A majority of the knowledge I have right now is a direct result of that room. I enjoyed being in that room which caused me to enjoy the studying and knowledge that I gained in that room. I don’t really know why I liked that room so much. It may have been the fact that it had a really comfortable leather desk chair that I loved to sit in. It might have been the unique smell of all of the books. I don’t know what it was but I just enjoyed everything about that room which in turn caused me to spend a lot of time in it. It is crazy to think that if one thing would have been different about that room I may be a completely different person. If it had a really crappy chair instead of a nice one I may have hated studying and went in a completely different direction with my life. It also effects my life know because I have tried to replicate the layout and feel of my parents computer room in my room here at school. I stole the comfy leather chair and put it at my desk, in fact I am sitting in it right now.

Even though I tried to replicate this room it still isn’t even close to the feel of my old study room. I still enjoy going home and sitting in that room and just looking up random stuff on wikipedia to expand my knowledge of the world. Until now I didn’t realize that the built environment could have so much effect on my life.

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Blog Prompt # 4: “If you were completely released from the
constraints of the ‘architecture school’ program, what would
you do architecturally, artistically, bodily, lyrically, etc that
would still have an impact on your environment. Describe a
real or imagined place which might allow you to do this.
oExplore through images and text

If I were to be released from the constraints of architecture I would love to spend at least one year traveling the world and looking at the most historic and amazing buildings and structures on the planet. My first stop would be probably have to be Italy because I’ve wanted to go there my whole life and then after that I wouldn’t really care what order the rest of my trip went in. I feel like if I traveled the world I would discover what buildings interest and inspire me the most but I wont actually know until I experience the feeling of being inside some of the greatest structures ever built.

Even though I have never been there I already have a feeling of what building in Italy will inspire me and get me the most excited about architecture, and that is the Roman Coliseum. Ever since I was young I have been obsessed with stadiums.

I think this obsession comes from a long standing family tradition of also being obsessed with the Green Bay Packers. Lambeau field is one of the greatest “contemporary� stadiums in the United States.

No stadium has as much history as Lambeau and no stadium means as much to its fans or the players that play in it as Lambeau. I can remember the first time I saw Lambeau as a kid driving in to Green Bay past all these tiny little houses and then all of sudden boom out of nowhere there is a huge green and gold stadium that can hold over 70,000 in the middle of all these tiny little houses. Most stadiums for professional football teams are located in big cities surrounded by other huge skyscrapers and often time neighbored by an equally massive professional baseball stadium. Most stadiums just kind of blend in with the landscape and their power and size is lost. Lambeau to me is just awe-inspiring. When Lambeau is full on a cold Sunday afternoon in December and the Packers score make a big play the entire place is electric.

In big games you can feel the excitement and tension in the air both inside the stadium and throughout the entire city of Green Bay. When the Packers score a winning touchdown in over time to win a big game there is no better place in the world to be. The rush of excitement fills the entire stadium and everyone is immediately ecstatic. I have literally seen 60 year old ladies jumping up and down screaming and hugging everyone in sight.

I feel as though Lambeau is the most exciting and fun stadium environment in the country mainly because of it’s location. At Lambeau there is no where for the excitement to escape to like there is in larger cities. All the energy and excitement of the entire area surrounding the stadium is focused in one place and on one thing and that thing is the Packers. It is truly a unique feeling and environment to experience.

If I were released from the constraints of the architecture program I would love to study these phenomenon and somehow replicate it and apply it to the design, construction, and location of new stadiums being built. I want to somehow share this unique experience with others. I want to visit other stadiums across the world and discover if there is any other stadiums that have similar phenomena or even a completely different and equally amazing phenomenon.

2008 Olympic Stadium

World Cup Soccer Stadium

My dream would be to visit every stadium in the world and discover as many unique elements as I possibly can. After I did this I would want to apply all of my research into one master stadium. My goal for this master stadium would be the give the fans watching the game the greatest possible experience you can have in a stadium. I would want them to experience ecstasy when their team is winning and doing well. I would want them to have a truly transcendental experience, a feeling they’ve never experienced before, a feeling truly out of this world. Not only would I want them to experience ecstasy when there team was doing well I would want them to experience the agony of heartache when there team is doing poorly. I want to design a stadium that feeds of the energy of their team and you can’t experience ecstasy without feeling agony.

In a nut shell…..If I were released from the constraints of the architecture program I would seek to design the greatest stadium ever built.

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Songs to Rock to While The World is Changing

1. Waiting on the World to Change-John Mayer
2. Thugz Mansion-TuPac
3. Bold is Love- Original song by Jimi Hendrix and re-make by John Mayer
4. Nothing is Gonna Stop Us-Jefferson Starship
5. I Try So Hard-Akon ft. Bone Thugz
6. Love Life-Atmosphere
7. Fight For Your Right-Beastie Boys
8. I Get By With a Little Help From My Friends-The Beatles
9. Times They Are A Changing-Bob Dylan
10. I Can See Clearly Now-Bob Marley
11. Life Goes On-Bone Thugz
12. Sideways-Citizen Cope
13. Penitentiary-Citizen Cope
14. Down With The Sickness-Disturbed
15. Ain't No Mountain High Enough-Marvin Gaye

I chose these songs because I feel that they all in some shape or form talk about and express the struggle of everyday life and the problems that we all deal with on a daily basis. Some also talk about problems we have in our society and remind me how significant and prevalent the problem of HIV/AIDS is.

Quotes

How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
Anne Frank

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. Nelson Henderson

Men make history, and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better.
Harry Truman

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead

“It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.�
Elizabeth Taylor

Videos

This video will give you some sense of how the HIV/AIDS problem is effecting people in the world.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyGYrwLJNkI

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On my first day at Achieve! Career and College Center at South High School I organized a lot files for Anne the coordinator of the center. It is Anne’s first year at South High School and she inherited, to say kindly, some very unorganized filing cabinets of hundreds of different colleges across the United States. Although this wasn’t that much fun I really did feel like I was helping the kids who visit the career and college center. By organizing these files in a neat way it gives the kids the ability to find a plethora of information about almost any college in the United States. Finding the right information about potential colleges they might want to attend is crucial in their decision-making and can possibly affect the rest of their lives. So even though organizing these files was tedious and boring it needed to be done and I felt like I was really helping the kids that visit the center by doing it. To my relief Anne said I would not be organizing files every time I volunteered and assured me that I would most likely get to work with a classroom full of kids the next time I visited.

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In the past months and years there has been a lot of controversy about whether or not the University should build a new stadium for their football team. On one side you had people saying that there was no need for a new stadium. They think that the Metro-dome is a perfectly suitable home for a college football team even though it's over a mile away from campus. Talk about a game day buzz kill. Where else in the country do you have to take a bus or trek multiple miles to get to YOUR teams football games, its ridiculous. The students waste so much energy trying to get to the game that by the time the game starts they have no energy to cheer for THEIR team. The atmosphere at a Minnesota home football game is one of the lamest in the country. None of the fans get into the game and most of the time the student section is half full at most. What is this a WNBA basketball game. You look at other teams across the country and their student sections are jam packed with kids jumping around and yelling, having a good time, some students even camp out in order to get tickets. In Minnesota you practically have to pay someone to take your ticket for you.

Growing up in Wisconsin I find all of these things in the previous paragraph ridiculous and thats why I think building a new stadium is a great thing. Hopefully, by inserting a stadium in the heart of the campus people will start getting excited about football. Maybe some of the energy that is Mariucci will flow over to the new football stadium. Maybe games will start to sell out just because of the atmosphere at TCF. Wouldn't that be sweet. For once I would like to brag to my friends that go to Wisconsin that Gopher football games are way more fun the Badger games. I tried to be a Gopher fan for my first semester here at the University of Minnesota but I just couldn't. I bought my season tickets for the football games as soon as I got accepted and was legitimately excited for my first Gopher football game. But when I went, the students were so lame that I had to leave by the end of the first half out of disgust. Now this is a big deal because I have never left a game by the first half, I'm a die hard sports fan, and find leaving games early to be a disgusting act and a crime. After my first game I went back to multiple other games, and again got excited for the Michigan game, thinking that maybe Gopher fans would get into a game against MICHIGAN! I mean there one of the best football colleges ever and your team has a chance to beat them. Nope. Nothing. The crowd was almost dead silent and once again I had to leave early.

I am an advocate for this stadium because I desperately want to be a fan of my alma mater. At this point I can't. I already made the decision second semester last year that Wisconsin is still my favorite college team, solely based on the atmosphere and heart of their fans. I'm hoping that the new stadium will give Gopher fans something to get excited about. I'm hoping that by having the stadium located on campus that students will have more fun at games. I hope that maybe, just maybe that at least the student section will sell out every game. Hopefully when I'm old I can brag that I went to a game at TCF stadium and had at least a somewhat memorable moment.

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Energy can be seen in many obvious and unique ways through a city. During the day the sun projects light onto the city and gives the people who populate the city energy that is necessarry to propel them through the work day and provide the valuables that people need in order to live. During the day people leave their homes to go to work or school and their home remains dark, lacking energy. Then at night, all the people return home, and when the sun sets and the city skyline goes dark the energy begins to shift. Eventually all the office buildings go dim and the energy, represented as light, begins to flow from the office building back to the home. This can be seen because the office building interiors become dark and energy less and the tall apartment buildings begin to glow more intensely until finally the city becomes dark and energy less as the people go to sleep. After the people go to sleep the same cycle begins the next day and continues each and everyday.

Flow can also be seen moving in and out the city in many ways. Flow can be related to traffic that the cars create when carrying the people who will provide the energy that the city needs to in order to run efficiently on. Energy flows in through a thick stream of cars and flows out 8 to 10 hours later with a thick stream of cars going the opposite way. You can usually tell where the direction of the flow, and the direction that the energy is flowing by which way the most traffic and cars are moving. When the flow of cars is heading for the city the majority of people will be focusing their energy on their work or career and when the flow of cars is later heading away from the city people begin to focus their energy on their family, friends, and other significant things in their life like entertainment and hobbies.

Energy and flow in a city tend to create transformation. The more energy and flow a city has the amount it transforms and the speed at which it will transform will be higher. Transformation can be seen through technology that creates taller buildings, better transportation, more efficiency, and much more. Transformation can also be seen through construction, for example the construction of the new Twins stadium is transforming downtown minneapolis, changing the highways, streets, and landscape. Orange cones, torn up roads, fallen bridges all can represent transformation. Often times the more construction there is the more transformation, energy, and flow there is in a city. Right now many important transformations are happening in Minneapolis. The re-construction of the 35-W bridge is crucial and effects how efficiently energy can enter and leave the city which in turn effects the overall efficiency of the entire city. Transformation, energy, and flow are all related and all are equally important to each other.

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