May, 2000
highlights
| The Actors |
Mark |
Sue |
Clint |
Lisa |
| Job |
Printer |
OTA |
Yardwork |
None |
| Relationship |
Husband & Wife | Son |
Daughter |
| Age |
46 &46 |
15 |
12 |
| Favorite sport |
climbing |
X-C skiing |
BMX jumping |
soccer |
| Grade Point |
3.94 |
NA |
3.833 |
3.833 |
Most of my time lately has been spent on building a complete new site for my final this quarter. A couple of my classmates offered me some space for school projects. Thanks Eric and Ty. My new site is still in peices but you are welcome to watch the progress.
Today has been fun. I went rollerblading around our development. I was doing some pretty fancy cross stepping on my blades. I knew I was having fun when even my mind was totally absorbed in the sheer grace of the motion. As I cruised around one of the culdesacs, I saw a 4 year old boy standing on the edge of the road in front of a nice home. He asked me to stop. "Can you help me fix my horn Mr.?"
"What's wrong with it?"
"It's stuck in the wrong way, can you fix it?"
I muscled it around and told him to get his Dad to screw it down tight.
"But I don't have a Dad"
"Well, get your Mom to screw it tight"
Kids without Dads are at a tremendous disadvantage. He looked so cute...but I can't put the world's problems on my shoulders. I dropped Lisa off at her friends house earlier. Their Dad walked out on them recently. I feel bad for these kids. I am making good progress on my final for the quarter. Time to get back to work.
One AM, Saturday morning. I've been up since 6 AM Friday. I worked in the print shop from 4:15 to midnight. I worked at my web designer internship from 1 to 4. I was at school from 8 to 12:30. Those are the bare facts. I had a reasonably good day of interning. I taught myself how to do actions last night and applied them to the text I had to make 3d in the project I am working on. Instead of about 50 clicks to change flat text into 3d, it took 6 clicks. Photoshop runs the action perfectly each time, even saving the transparent gif to the the proper directory under the right name. Yesterday I made 15 of them the hard way and had to remake 6 due to errors. Actions are awesome! I felt pretty low in the AM. Luckily, the spell passed and I was tip top by the time I arrived at my web job. I worked late tonight in printing so I could have 3 whole days off. Neither of my jobs nor my instructors own my time this weekend. That won't stop me from filling it up with homework. Final assignments have been handed out in N's class. We are supposed to take everything we have learned this year and make a multiple mouseover resume/homepage with a button for a flash page, or several flash pages. We are only limited by our creativity. I should get relaxed enough to do some good artistik thinking. I was joshing P. today in class about his long hair. We have a nice bunch of students there. I miss the relaxed afternoons doing lab time. I love my internship, don't get me wrong...it's just a change I suppose...and definitely for the better.
I am amazed by how much web design is like printing. That is probably why I felt confident in it as a career choice. The web design field is printing without the presses. Same sales people, book keepers, bosses and customer service reps. Same computer geeks handling the same stack of papers and photos from the customer describing his advertising needs and ideas. The same concepts of design. The only difference is the software used to compose and format the concepts on the screen. Once the design is ok'd, the similarity ends. In web design, the pages are uploaded to the internet and we are done, barring revisions or updates. In printing, the geek is merely a step along the way toward the pressroom. The pressman is a sort of manual computer screen...except we put the customers concepts to paper instead of the internet. I am falling off my chair.
Saw my first track meet today. Sue has made them all and tries to describe how well Clint is doing with words. But to see it in person...it made my heart sing. His first race was the 800 at which he is unbeaten.
Before he even got half way around the first corner, he led the pack by a solid 60 feet. He stretched that out during the next two laps and finished far in the lead with a sprint for a cheering crowd. I am falling behind in my homework now that I am interning in the afternoon instead of doing lab time at school. I have a bit much on my plate right now...but I am loving it.
Here are a couple links to pages my fellow classmates have put up recently.
Guy
Laura
Ty
Linda
Michelle
Gulten
Most of my time for the last 3 days has gone into building a new site for my final due in 2 weeks. I don't have time for a lot of writing here. I've been busy with homework, both jobs and school. All three days I sat at the computer from get up to lay down with a few breaks for aerobic rollerblading. My new site is still in peices but you are welcome to watch it in progress. I would like to give a big thank you to Eric and Ty at Intellifire.com for hosting this site for me. I am aiming for a more professional look than this three year old site. It is refreshing to start from scratch with sound design principles in mind from the get go.
I worked my first complete afternoon at my new internship today. Considering I was feeling a bit under the weather, I did ok. It feels a little strange, sitting at a new desk and terminal in a room full of people I barely know. Fortunately I have been through many "first weeks" in my long career as a press operator. It's great to put my skills to use on some real content. School is such a lousy place to learn. In school, we study stuff for a quarter, then move on to something else. Right now, in school I am quite confident at Javascript mouseovers and Flash. However, in my internship I am using tables, frames and a little CSS. There are so many different skills used by web designers that our instructors have to focus on one at a time. We focus, then move on. But a real web designer uses all of them at once, all the time. So I have quite a learning curve to climb. Fortunately all the things I am doing are quite familiar, it's just that some of the little details have been temporarily forgotten. Once I learn the particular skill set required in this new position, I can brush up.
We had our second math exam of the quarter this morning at 8 AM. I may have gotten a B or higher. I felt pretty confident even though I didn't read the last 25 pages of the chapters it covered. There simply wasn't time. Clint is running in a big track meet tomorrow. It will be the first one I have been able attend. His track team is up against a skilled school this time. They are rumored to have a runner who could beat him in the 800, a race at which he is unbeaten. I will bring my long lense and have some fun. The bummer is that I have to go back to work afterwards from 7 to 10 PM.
It's a quiet Sunday morning. There is a light breeze blowing through the woods outside. We live on the edge of a large greenbelt. Our house is surrounded by second growth forest (8" to 20" diameter), mostly fir with a few madrona and the other green things that loose their leaves in winter. There is a huge cedar tree (3 feet thick) twenty feet from the house that keeps Sue up on the roof sweeping several times a year. I am trying to draw a picture with words of what a nice place to live this is. We can walk on shady trails down to the community lake with all it's somewhat tattered amenities. Outside of the community around the lake are miles of open forest. We sometimes walk the powerline road for miles. But, until September, I am stuck here at the computer, learning my new trade of web design. I'm not complaining mind you...well maybe a little...alright, this sucks!
Sue and the kids are planning their day of bmx jumping, shopping and photography. I am looking at 12 hours of keyboard homework plus 3 hours of cramming for my technical math test on Tuesday. I'll definitely take a couple rollerblading breaks. The one lane roads that wind through our community are perfect for rollerblading. The asphalt is smooth and there are just enough hills to make it exciting. I can "parallel ski" on my blades just like on snow. It's as exciting as my life gets these college days. Work was pretty easy yesterday. I made it harder than it had to be by not going in until 4 PM. Then I had to work until 10:30 PM. I could have stayed another hour but the pre-press people gave me two bad plates. While they're usually extremely accurate,every now and then they shove stuff through the system to press, apparently with their eyes closed. Part of my job is keeping my eyes open for this very kind of error. I called the salesman at home for confirmation, pulled the job and left early. Sue and the boys left for jumping heaven. Lisa stayed home to do homework. Time to bury our heads in the books.
My birthday passed without an entry. I haven't gotten excited about birthdays in a long time. On my 30th, I took the day off work, played my Martin guitar and cried all day. On my 40th I wrote a bunch of poetry about art. Yesterday, I was still getting over this cold plus a bit of the dizzies so I simply went about my normal business of work and school. Only a few people knew it was my birthday outside my family. My foreman at work, G. has the same birthday so several people there knew. When we were born is such an arbitrary thing. Does a grizzly bear know when it's birthday is? If a bear ____s in the woods, does anyone hear it? I lined up my internship today. I plan to be cautious about describing my web design internship here. I don't want to jeopardize it here for the sake of entertainment. Suffice to say that it looks like a perfect fit. It's now eleven o'clock at night. This's been a long week. I have a good eight hours of work tomorrow before I can launch into the homework. We have our second math test on Tuesday. I will need to have a good muddy wallow of math on Sunday.
Lunched today with a real web designer. He is a former student of my current instructor N. at Clover Park Technical College. He had a lot of interesting information about life as a web designer. He has gotten into the programming end of the field, working with Cold Fusion to make dynamic, client driven pages. I wasn't aware that the Web Design business got so specialized. He said they have departments. There are the programmers, the graphics people, the sales people, the management team and the receptionist who also does some something in the back, it might have been data entry. I was thinking an all around person was the ticket but it appears I am mistaken. I don't want to specialize before I know what I am best at. Right now, I appear to be good at it all. The thing I have enjoyed the most has been Flash. But I also enjoy a good session of trouble shooting JavaScript or CSS. My best guess would lean toward the graphics end. But I don't want to rule out Cold Fusion or Java before I even try them. Who knows, I could easily save my artistic talents for my spare time and immerse myself in hard coding. That is probably precisely why she has us looking for an internship...so that we can experience the real market and discover where we excel.
Math class was pitiful today. He had warned us that we would have to get up and work a problem at the board today to give his bronchitis a break. Instead of 25 students, there might have been 8. What is so scary about standing up before a small crowd? Now that I went through my communication class with the venerable Mr.. G, I love speaking. We got some new G4 Macs up in pre-press. They look pretty snazzy. I ordered a Kensington Expert Mouse track ball. Our new pre-press person said it would be a good investment in my hands. I don't see myself getting dual carpal tunnel surgery like she has had anytime soon, however, my hands have had a long and active life. They ache now and then when I am dragging these cheap mice around for 12 hours a day. The big ball track ball looks like a good way to ease the load a bit. She puts in longer hours than I am likely to and swears by it. Her control is phenomenal. The neatest thing so far looks to be the way you don't have to lift up the mouse when the line is too long. I am looking forward to the silly thing. I will consider it my birthday present to myself.
Most of my entries here start with I. Perfectly natural for something as unnatural as an online journal. My folks came up for mother's day. They took us out to a local greasy spoon. Math class is getting interesting. We are studying the story problem chapter. If you have a 160 pound casting that weighs 142 pounds after it has finished the machining process, what is the waste percentage? I loved this stuff in 1970 and I still like it now. He asked us today whether we wanted to finish out the quarter studying the surface area of spheres or graphing sine waves. He said we could do both poorly or wallow in one or the other, depending on how fast we finish the percentage chapter. An interesting question...I never got to either in high school, having ended my math at Algebra 3 due to boredom with graphing. Speaking of math, I need to get out of here and do some homework.
One of our outside sales people at work is also a published author. He writes inspirational books and was very kind to my father when he was learning about self-publishing his oil spill book. K. and I have been talking about working on the company site. I have taken it on as a school project and had some fun making frames, mouseovers, forms and a couple flash animations. K. is using a program called Drumbeat to write his page. It is very professional looking but has some bugs still when viewed with Netscape. The whole browser issue is troublesome for web designers. This page itself should be displaying Comic Sans MS in both browsers but doesn't. I promise I will debug that in the next couple days. Now I need to wallow in Trigonometry for a couple hours.
Total hours this week including tomorrow spent doing work and school related stuff will equal 114 hours. I am including my hour and 15 minute commute five days a week as well as the thirty minute return commute at night. Also included are the study times after I get home. This week I was up until 2 AM three times so far. I have been keeping this up since late September. No wonder I'm showing the strain.
On a lighter note, I am now working in a trial version of Homesite. As I typed the span code to make the big first letter at the start of this sentence, it automatically filled in the closing span tag. Very cool! My instructor and one of the web designers I visited use Homesite professionally. Out in the car is a free desk my Boss gave me. It used to sit under the Mac up in pre-press. It's 5 feet by 30 inches by 30 inches. One of the legs has a stripped out anchor bolt and has fallen off. All the varnish is chipped and scratched. The linoleum top is chipped out 2 inches on one corner. But there is not a bit of particle board in the whole thing. All the drawers, and there are 5 plus a slider on each side are real wood. I did see some high grade multi laminate plywood somewhere. Sue is going to hate it for sure. She would have been far happier with a $200 particle board desk from a mega store. I am practical (read that as Scotch Irish Cheap) where as she would like to have a lovely home. Instead she has a lovely husband...more than many women can say and she knows it. What did she expect from a guy who picked her up on our first date in a Gremlin?
I spent last night and this morning building the pretty tables at the top and bottom of these journal pages. I only updated back about 6 months. I tried to figure out why my CSS (in Netscape) wasn't extending past the second table but ran out of time. I really like the look the CSS gives. And it will work in both browsers the way I designed it. I just need to find the bug. It's really going to be exciting putting in the new desk tomorrow. The computer desk I am working at now is one third the size and all particle board with no drawers. The only good thing about it is the CD rack and the hutch above. That shouldn't be too hard to remedy. Sue has expressed an interest in refinishing the old solid wood desk when her school closes for summer break.
Yes, I should be sleeping. I have to get up in five hours to head for school. Today was so special that I want to write down some of what happened before I forget it. I made three cold calls to web design firms today asking each what skills they required of prospective web designers. Over and over I heard the same four or five things:
- html, no wysiwyg's
- PhotoShop
- Communication skills to work in teams and with the customer
- a creative mind
- a willingness to learn new things
- showing up everyday
- Optional frosting on the cake:
- Flash
- server side: PHP, ASP, PERL, Cold Fusion, IHTML
My instructor appears to be doing a fantastic job of training us in exactly what these employers are looking for. One employer's list of things I needed to know was so close to our course curriculum it was uncanny. Write more later...need some shut eye.
JavaScript is so cool! Today I learned how to write an if-else script. Our instructor N. had given us a simple script to write that changed background colors when day turned to night. I altered it to change on the half hour. I wasn't at all sure I had written the script right and sat watching eagerly, refreshing the browser every few seconds as the minute turned over. At the very second of the final minute switch, my background color changed from white to black. It was like watching the space shuttle take off. Well...not quite...still, it was pretty cool. Even G., the brilliant student on my left, was impressed. Before, all JavaScript did for me was cute little rollovers. But with this if-else concept I should soon be able to build a browser detect from scratch. For those of you who aren't geeks, a browser detect refers to the problem web designers have designing for the two different browsers, Netscape and Internet Explorer. Both read html differently. A web page that looks lovely in Internet Explorer 4 can look terrible in Netscape Communicator. Even the same browser with different monitor sizes can ruin a page written with high end Cascading Style sheets. With the ability to detect which browser the visitor is using to view my page, I will be able to force his computer to access only the page written specifically for his browser. I am straying from my subject here... Anybody can cut, paste and adapt JavaScript. N. is teaching us how to write it from scratch. She keeps reminding us that it's like learning Japanese. Until this latest lesson I really didn't feel I had enough of a concept to tackle writing it from scratch. Now I am looking forward to wallowing in it.
I went out and made cold calls to three web design firms in Tacoma today between school and work. I only got past the secretary at one firm and have a loose appointment there tomorrow. I am also in touch with one of my instructor's successful former students who works for another one of her former students at a local up and coming web design firm. Tomorrow I need to contact 3 to 5 web design businesses in order to get a firm idea of what employers expect from new employees in this field. It should be fun. I have plenty of experience making cold calls due to my many years of trying to move up the ladder in the printing business. We aren't really supposed to be looking for jobs yet anyway. There are 3 months left to go in the 11 month course. My instructor did say though, that if I turned down a decent job offer just so I could finish out the class, she would flunk me out for sheer stupidity. We are technically paving the way for a future internship that would start next quarter which is around the middle of June. I am really tired. Last night I woke up at 3 AM worrying about the cold calls I breezed through today. My head hurts. Time for some shut eye.
It's playing hooky I am, writing here...should be doing homework, don't ya know. But I'm working on my Irish Brogue while listening to a great talking book. Many of the library's collection of talking books are recorded in England, often by actors with amazing linguistic talents. This current one is read by a lassie with a bewitching Irish brogue. While listening on my drive home, she got a call from America and switched flawlessly into a perfect American accent.
Sunday was lovely. We drove the whole family down to Olympia to see my folks. Clint brought a friend to ride the BMX hot spots. I did homework on Dad's old computer and went skating across town. I ran into both Sue, Lisa and Clint, in various places. Rollerblading is a very mobile sport. It takes quite a bit more skill than bike riding but makes up for the effort with satisfaction. One of my classmates is into fencing, like with big, dangerous swords. It sounds fascinating. I tried to redesign this page to reflect some of the new tricks I have learned since the last major overhaul at Christmas. I couldn't even come close to a site wide re-design in the 6 hours I had to spare. I need to hire a web designer...Hee Hee. Ok, I will buckle down to homework now.
Everyone is looking for an internship this coming week. We are supposed to go out and arrange for an informational interview with a prospective employer or two. Some of the recommended questions to ask are:
- What do you look for in a prospective employee?
- What job skills are in highest demand?
- What software or programming language is the most important?
I complained to my teacher about not having any money to get some looking for work clothes. She pointed at her skirt and said, "Go to the Goodwill, where do you think I got this?" I went that afternoon and she was right. I found row after row of very presentable clothes. Pants were six dollars. I bought two pairs of pants by Dockers. I feel quite fashionable now. Math class has been overloading all my circuits. He gave us a story problem this morning. If you have one liter of a solution that is 30% ethyl alcohol, how much more ethyl alcohol would you have to add to make it a solution of 40%. It seems on the surface like an added 100 ml would bring it up to 40%...If you have 300 ml of ethyl mixed into 700 ml of water, it totals 1000 ml and is 30 % ethyl. But an added 100 ml brings up the total ethyl to 400 but now you have 400 ethyl mixed into 700 water for a total of 1100 ml. That should work out to 40% but in fact is 36.3% ethyl. I spent 3 hours at the kitchen table tonight working the math. I seem to have a mental block on this one. I wonder whether I am struggling because it is near the end of my work week and I am to tired to think anymore.
Excuses...Why do I need excuses to do fun things like write in this journal? I think it's because I put too much pressure on myself to excel at school. Even writing here is technically playing hooky. Why, I could (should?) be calculating X to the negative 4th power equals ???. But I am ahead of the game in math. We took a test last Tuesday. He has been telling us that at least one person aced the test. We were all secretly hoping we were that person. Tuesday he handed them back. I was that person. Actually there were several of us who aced it. But he singled me out for some odd reason. Perhaps it was because of the thorough homework notebook I handed in for review. Anyone who has been doing the exercises in the back of each chapter could have aced that test. From the questions my classmates are asking, it is clear they have not been doing the optional exercises. Or he may have singled me out because I don't appear to be that bright, at least on casual examination. He is my first class which, for us swing workers, is a bad thing. And I am also subject to the "dizzy stupids" every other day. Since I only see him for fifty minutes each morning, if I am at the peak of a dizzy spell, I appear pretty dense. He could well have been shocked that someone who asks dumb questions could ace a test. At any rate, I am very pleased. I loved math in High School and I like it now.
It's been a rollercoaster ride of Menieres Disease lately. I am never completely symptom free for longer than 8 hours. I'm either starting up the slippery incline of a spell, in one, or coming back down.
Like right now...I feel completely fine. This morning I was moderately dizzy. I could think ok... just wasn't sure if I was coming down or going up. I got off work at 8 PM and walked the old North End hill in the rain before I drove home. The smells of spring were exotic. I like walking along the manicured sidewalks in the dark, observing the rich people through the picture windows of their high class living rooms. Someday that could be me, but not now. I'm a blue collar slave, working my way through college with a monkey on my back.
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