First thing in the morning I put a ding into the rear quarter panel of my car. As I backed into my parking space I felt a nudge but thought nothing of it. Until I got out and walked behind out of curiosity. You know that new yellow paint they put on the garage? It is the exact same color as cast by the sun in the morning. Watch for that. You can see the nice yellow color on my bumper, as well. How could I do that much damage and not even make a sound?
Actually, it is not as bad as it looks. The bumper has only paint on it and the crunched quarter panel will pop out with a dent puller. Don’t you hate it when there is nobody to blame but yourself?
Martha, the lady who works at the real estate office, came by this morning. She wants her son enrolled for ten days of lessons. I made a deal with her. $35 for three hours per day for ten days. However, if he proves to be too young or distracted from the lessons, the deal is off. Daniel is two years younger than my normal student minimum. Although I do not remember him, I do recall meeting him a few months back and deciding he was an exception. He attends a special school for gifted children (but who doesn’t these days) so I have ten days to turn him into the top of the class. He is just around the age to be ready for basic spreadsheets.
That young guy who has cancer came by again. People give him things to sell. When I way young I mean early thirties and he apparently has been given six months maximum. He is active and energetic but sadly just a bit thinner every month. Today he had an old “one-speed” bicycle in nearly perfect condition. I gave him his asking price on the spot. It has a retro look, with fat white sidewall tires. Original paint and you’d have to squint to see the tiny bits of rust.
I test drove the thing and it is smooth and silent. Oddly, I like silent as in I don’t care for that clicking noise that ten-speeds make when they are coasting. This bike has been stored indoors so the rust is minimal. The seat is comfortable and I road it around for a an hour this evening. They say bikes average six times faster than walking, but in my case it is easily ten times. I’d forgotten how much ground I could cover on wheels. The other good news is that I carried on at a good clip all around the race track parking log and did not even get winded. I need a big allen wrench to lower the handlebars but I do believe I’ll ride it into work tomorrow.
Over at the donut shop I showed Lise the laptop. I told her to take her time and think it over. I’m in no rush to sell it. I worked on Thom’s old computer tonight to find the memory slots are bad. Or at least do not work as needed so they may as well be bad. Al was in today for nearly two hours. This is yet another student of mine who less than two weeks ago said they were untrainable. I got my start many moons ago teaching adults how to dance and I have some truly successful methods. Al knows very well his progress has been astounding because he is already at the problem solving state. With computers that often manifests itself when they start asking the right questions.
It is no big deal, teaching adults, because they actually have a lifetime of learning experience. My technique is a combination of “channelizing” that knowledge and what I call the “Show Me How” method. Everyone agrees it takes patience but they rarely realize it is a different brand of patience with a huge gap between supply and demand. This will be the more interesting because Al often surprises himself when he draws the right conclusion about a computer task, so not only is he a top student, he is actually a successful experiment and I predict he will be most successful at computer operations.
However, Al is not my top student of all time. That award remains with Howard, the man who programmed his own web page after five lessons from me. This was the more surprising because I had just learned to do it myself a month earlier. Hey, I’m an instructor, not a teacher. I get to do things like that. Let’s take a close-up at that new bicycle with the sparkling red paint and shiny spokes. While ogling, swoon at the deliciously 1960s whitewall tires. Look at that sturdy construction and weep. I’m not telling you the price, but it was less than $50. It is called “Madwagon”. I need to get a carrier installed but I was not too happy to hear that Jerry, the Irishman, had to pay $80 for his.
Of course, everyone is dying to hear how my CSS studies are coming along. Great. I’m past all the beginners material and moving into design, which is the purpose of CSS. It removes the presentation from the content. Animation is tied to the art of web pages and it may not be long before I’m compelled to get into that – but not to worry, I do have two unused degrees in computer programming.
In fact, I noticed that some of the CSS arrangements are similar to the C family (C, C+, C++), so I’ve begun to read a text on that already. I see that CSS borrowed heavily from the ways that C++ notates arrays, which somehow does not surprise me. Allow me to state that C++ is the most complicated and retarded computer language ever invented. It was plainly a committee effort and they did not get anything right. Nor does the claim that it is a new language does not let them off the hook –it is not a new language at all, just a complicated one. (It has no entirely new constructs, it amounts to a contorted offshoot of BASIC, which has been around since 1960 or so.) To their shame, most of that complication is taken up by patching up errors that they should have addressed in the first place, often resulting in having to do things the opposite of what is logical. C++ is a bad programming language.
I’d have to dig into my archives on that topic, but I once listed a dozen rules to be satisfied before any new computer language was adopted. These were such practical things as only using symbols found on an ordinary 101 keyboard (you’d be surprised how often they get that wrong) and inventing new standard symbols for multiplication and division. The less obvious rules are standard punctuation (so that things like color=”red” is not allowed) and that the most commonly used commands are all typed on keys near the home row. Thus anyone who writes “file_name” would be executed at dawn.
