I guess the weeks of
questioning my ability and intelligence and the nights
of worrying
whether or not I would make it through this semester, were all worth it after all.
Success finally came in posting my reports on my homepage (as you can obviously
see) and it was a sweet relief, let me tell you. I found an HTML converter
in the Keller
Maclab on their Clarisworks program. So I am able to type up my reports, bring my
discs to the lab and convert and post in a few minutes. The Clarisworks program
has the option of saving your document in a variety of formats and HTML i
s one of them.
This was a very welcome discovery that I happened to stumble upon during my computer
sessions (panic sessions are more like it). I was also having a lot of problems
using Fetch and transferring my data but after fiddeling around, I fo
und out I was sending
my file as text. When I tried linking to the file and it didn't work, I decided
to try something else. This is when I noticed that in Fetch you can choose raw data
as a format for sending your file, when I tried this it all came
together. I also managed
to complete links to my teammates, my group
reports and Dr. James. I also plan to
add links to various sites I find
entertaining or interesting. Needless to say I
am, at this point, one
happy guy. Oh joy!
Hijacking Jason Raad
Now on
to the good stuff. After figuring out all the aforementioned junk, this week
was not tough, but to balance out the trouble I've been having, this week gets a
4. What I did was look through the Generation 1 files, specifically the student
homepages.
I looked through a few and decided to use Jason Raad's Homepage,
mostly
because
it was pretty simple. I value simplicity in my aesthetics and in this case it suits
my purpose and anybody who is going to use the page. First I downloaded the page
onto
my disc and then used Fetch to transfer the file into my CSS account. Seeing as
how the style was pretty similar to what I like and want to do, I only made a few
minor adjustments. For example, I changed Jason's name to my name, I added a week
2 and
separated week 3 & 4. Jason had little comments next to the links for his weekly reports,
so I had to add a couple of little comments also. I also made links to my weekly
reports as outlined in the assignment. Jason also had links to alternate h
omepages
he had so I took one of the links for his other homepage and
linked it back to mine.
Ratings
Contrary to
last week, I gave this
week only a 3 for negative emotion because the
small amount of paranoid stress I did experience (I hope my diskette
s don't spontaneously
erase, that kind of thing) was far outweighed by the positive emotions I experienced once I got my work posted and mostly linked up. Last week I felt like a loser,
like I would never be able to get any better at this computer junk
. I thought my
career as a computer geek was finished before it started. But as the saying goes
"hope springs eternal". And as the other saying goes,"you can't make a racehorse out of a pig,
but you can sure make one fast pig".
I rated the
value of this week as an 8, because hey who knows when one may need to
steal someone else's work and claim it as one's own. Oh well, that's about all I
can think of. I guess you never know, one day the computer crashes, your disks go
through magneti
c fields and you're stuck for a complete homepage. Voila.
I do think I'll be getting good at this stuff because, looking at homepage source
files and borrowing things like that can be very useful. Especially when you're
starting out, it hel
ps to look at other people's source files in order to pick up
on shortcuts or more efficient ways of doing things. After all I've been through trying to
get my stuff together, I notice a new confidence in myself and my ability to learn
and solve probl
ems. I think just relaxing and thinking through the problem and asking
other people is the best thing you can do.
My satisfaction has gone up considerably for this week, so this week gets an 8. Now
that the bulk of my burden is taken care of
and it's only the minor bugs that have
to be worked out, things seem a
lot less dismal.
I gave my self a 9 for not giving up and boy,
am I glad I didn't. It was well worth
it. Now this computer stuff
doesn't seem as terrifying and esoteric.
I did notice a rather strange fossilized error, I have a tedency
to misspell and.
I've been spelling it adn. That's all I can think of
this week.
At least for this week Mr. Lacunae went into
retirement. I don't have too much inadequacies to speak of. Well, I
guess that about does it for this week. See you next week kids.