Posts by Sharon Mahoney

Journalistic fan fever.

July 2, 2003, by No comments yet

Bradley Steinbacher of The Stranger is in love… with Paul Krugman, the courageous, outspoken economics columnist at the NYT.

I wrote a mash note to Mr. Krugman several months ago that echoed Steinbacher’s. And although I’m sure he had better things to do with his time, he actually sent a personal thank-you. Whoa. Continued…

Cat hair drama.

June 28, 2003, by No comments yet

The heat wave finally broke and we had a beautiful, breezy, sunny day. I was more relieved for the cats than for myself, especially the older one — she’s over fifteen and doesn’t deal with extreme heat very well.

Normally, on the first really hot day of the season I give Briana her annual bath, a process that I can’t really describe as “fun“, but one she usually tolerates without using either teeth or claws and with only the occasional growl or yowl. She also lets me use the blow dryer on her without flinching once we’re done, possibly because she’s used to seeing me use it each morning on myself. Continued…

Epic Heat.

June 27, 2003, by No comments yet

Well, managed to bungle a ridiculously simple web design test, misreading one of the first lines of code and consequently sketching the resulting screen shot totally differently from the actual answer.

Duh.

In addition, I missed a scheduled lunch date because I couldn’t make the in-class Javascript exercise work even if my very life depended upon it, and by the time I finally gave up and called my friend, he had gone without me.

And the final straw, after a long and hot walk (it’s supposed to top out at over 95 degrees today) to the car, I realized that I’d left my driving glasses in the classroom. So back I went. By the time I returned to my car not even full-blast air conditioning could cool an interior temp that must have easily exceeded 120 degrees. Continued…

What you see isn’t always what you get.

June 13, 2003, by No comments yet

I was intrigued by the talk in class Thursday about the effect of internet browsers upon web page displays, and thought that it might be a good idea to have more than one browser available on my computer so I can check how things look as I work.

So I went to Netscape.com and ordered a copy of Netscape 7 on CD-ROM; it should arrive next week. I then restarted the laptop in OS X and downloaded Mozilla. Fired ‘er up and WOW. It’s like being in a parallel universe. The single most striking example of the change was when I logged on to make this very post–the interface is a lot more sophisticated than the one I use in Explorer in OS 9.2.
Continued…

Web Design for Dummies (like me!)

June 4, 2003, by No comments yet

I’m taking an “elementary“ computer course for my degree requirement and found out that the syllabus will concentrate on web design and HTML. Pretty good timing, huh?

I could do this student thing forever. It amazes me that there are actually people out there who are not the least bit curious about finding out new stuff–who in fact, are afraid to learn anything new; who’d rather sit in front of the television all day and let it do the thinking and adventuring for them, because it would be too threatening to attempt anything else.

In Orwell’s 1984 they broke Winston Smith by threatening him with the one thing in the world he was most afraid of–rats. The way to break me would be to sit me in a room with nothing but a toilet, a bed, and a television set without an “off“ button. No other humans, no books, no writing implements, no music, no computer, no web access…. just the unyielding gaze of the glass teat, day after day. After a week of this I’d be ready to stick my head in the toilet and drown myself. And yet, there are people out there who voluntarily live like that, with the one difference being that they also have access to snacks. Continued…

More changes.

June 2, 2003, by No comments yet

I’ve transferred this to a template I got off the net, but it’s written in CSS rather than pure HTML like the last one, so I’m a bit at sea trying to tweak the code to get rid of the lines above each interactive link on the right-hand menus. I can get it to work for certain links and not for others, but I don’t know how I did it…the code looks the same for lined and unlined links on my template. It’s maddening. But it is a gorgeous interface, much more subtle than the last one I came up with. (I still want to learn HTML, though, so I can design my own site from scratch and change it when the mood hits me…like when I need to practice creative avoidance.)

I also managed to relocate this onto my free server space to get rid of that Blogspot banner ad on the top. The difficult there mainly involved downloading and learning to use Fetch, and once I fumbled my way through the instructions and accomplished my first upload to my site’s new home I figured it out. Read on, Macduff…