I was over at the wig shop first thing this morning. Ruth is one tough student. Probably from having to be tough in the same business for fifty years. She responds well to instruction and can instantly pick out what is important. For example, I showed her a couple things on how web pages work and she immediately used that to check up on her web programmer. I thought it was Justin, but it was not.
She is feisty but so what? She took the knowledge and zeroed in on several web features and was able to pick out that she had been shortchanged and delayed here and there. Not much, but if I was her programmer, I’d start watching out. Also, Ruth now knows exactly how to check if her employee is doing her work or not. Accountants can be bad for that old trick [doing other work while logged on your computer].
Here’s a better picture of the Beatles. That is Ruth standing behind Ringo Starr applying his makeup. There, plain as day, you can see Paul, Ringo, John and that other guy. There was another with her and Ed Sullivan but it didn’t turn out. The Argus is great, not perfect. Yes, in response to all who cannot let go, there is one there from Elvis [Presley]. Before he blimped out.
From there I barely got home and headed over to fix a Dell. It is crammed up with Internet downloads, pop-ups and general junk that clogged the gears. I could not begin to uninstall these, so I have it sitting here to take in tomorrow. That also means I made decent money today and I’m now at home baking bread, making turkey stew and drinking decaf. Does it get any better?
In the late afternoon light, I went over to Borders at Aventura. I see the longer I ride, the higher my average speed. Which is just over 9 mph after 268 miles. This shows that I am not tiring over distance. It is short range stopping and starting that drops the average, I thought it might be the opposite because I am constantly cranking up to speed after each stop and these stops are not long enough to get “rested up”. Diet-wise, I finally finished that pound of salt I bought seven years ago.
The trip to Borders was to look closer at CSS. I’ve been having trouble getting it to code and I now theorize that CSS is no better designed than the HTML it was supposed to improve. The code is more readable but the commands are not discrete. A small change to one area can cause a real mess elsewhere. In a proper language, each command has no such side-effects. Remember, it is my opinion that object-oriented programming is nothing but a collection of all the mistakes made by students who couldn’t cut it over the years (I have good reasons to think this) and it was a sad day for the programming community when they began giving degrees to such people.
In fact, the whole concept [of object programming] is so bad, I’ll wager if a large enough sample were taken, one could determine not only which school and lectures a given OOPs person attended, but also predict which logic courses he failed. The construction of CSS follows the same inane system of inconsistent rules of unequal gravity and full of exceptions. The latter are always a sign of bad planning.
I’ve decided to layer the CSS coding. This makes it no better than MS Publisher, or any of the other bad applications that force a person to adapt centuries old linear writing to a nested container arrangement. People write from the top of the page down, not outward from a central point, yet that is how web coding works. Little else you write is contained (in the same sense). A rough analogy would be a letter you type that, once you put it in the envelope to mail it, all the dates and paragraphs shift around or get clipped off the page and any photos you included change shape. Instead, you have to make all these things fit in the envelope and then go write the letter.
The CSS pundits make a big deal how you no longer have to keep watching for indents and table structures in your HTML. Yeah, but now you have to keep alert for the positioning of your divisions and classes. Nonetheless, I am getting closer to a simple but unique blog page design. Despite the three month delay, it is getting closer.
There is a definite progression in the books on this topic since 1999. Nobody seemed to want to admit that it was better to design fluid pages that adapt to the web browser, rather than bothering with whacky code to accommodate the differences. I’ll avoid that entirely by going for the proportionate sizes right away. This would appear as a web page that resizes itself whenever the dimensions change, we’ve all seen them.
During all this, I found out the name of the average when speeds are used. Most people would say if I drove to Fort Lauderdale at 40 mph and drove back at 60 mph, my average was 50 mph. Of course, it is not, because it took me longer to drive there than back. The name for the correct calculation is the “harmonic mean”. It is represented by the number of individual items divided by the sum of the reciprocals of the individual items. In this case, 2 divided by the sum of 1/60 plus 1/50, or 47.999 mph. This will help any of you who get stumped by that childhood puzzle about the canoe in the creek.
Did I just say pundits?
