HTML and Me

Years ago, when I was working at Florida Atlantic University, there was an exceptionally good instructor in the IT department who trained faculty and staff on applications ranging from MS Word, to PowerPoint, to Photoshop, to HTML. I sat in her basic classes, and tried to practice whatever I learned. It wasn’t until a few years went by that I was given the “privilege’ of being able to create websites for my department and load them to the site. At that point we used FrontPage, to both create and upload the pages to our server. My method of creating a page was to find one on the web whose style I really liked, copy that part of the code, and paste it into FrontPage. I would then manipulate it using the little bit of HTML I knew, along with the FrontPage editor.

I’ve found it very valuable to know a smattering of code because it has enabled me to review the code and often clean out the garbage that has been added. It was not unusual at that time for FrontPage to add lines and lines of ;nbsp.

At my current job, I am responsible for our campus’ library’s homepage, contacts, information about the library, etc. We must use Ingenuix, a content management system, to create and upload pages. Just recently the college purchased DreamWeaver licenses for faculty and staff, and I’m looking forward to learning it. In theory we may be able to create something interesting, but because so much is locked down within the style options of Ingenuix (fonts, colors, sizes, no flash, etc.), in reality all we have is a little white space and a GUI web editor that makes for some boring web pages.

Does the Internet Make You Dumber?

I recently read an article in the Wall Street Journal (June 5, 2010) titled “Does the Internet Make You Dumber? According to research, there have been significant neurological changes in the ways the brain processes information after using the Internet. It was hypothesized that the hyperlinked environment keeps one in a constant state of mental stimulation, and does not allow for focus or deep attention, which in turn encourages shallow thinking.

I was fascinated by the article because I’ve noticed that my retention of the material I’ve read on the web, like Wikipedia articles where I follow internal links, is practically nil. Of course there could be many other reasons for this, including a lack of a knowledge base which does not allow for new material to relate.

On many web pages, information, in an severe act of reductionism, is stripped of its details and left with only the highlights presented. Is this leading to a bullet-point mentality? I'm not sure--I've been working on a command line interface for so long the past three days its hard to tell.

Unit 4

I am trying to build a better understanding of what I am doing, but I still don’t have a solid foundation that I can relate these command line interactions to. Friday things were going very well with Assignment 1 when I decided it was time to take a snapshot. In one stupid instance I hit Ctrl. Alt, Delete rather than Ctrl and Alt, and was sent to Windows task manager. When I navigated back to Ubuntu, I got a message which I thought was telling me I had made a fatal error. Visions of hours of reinstalling and configuring all the work I had previously done swam before my eyes. Luckily Bruce was monitoring the discussion list, and told me how to get back to where I started. I had taken an earlier snapshot, but had not yet used the process of restoring Ubuntu using one. That part was easier than I thought.

I try to be so precise when entering commands, and often get results I expect, but other times not. One frustrating part for me is not knowing how to recover from an error if going back through all the steps don’t help. One tip I learned the hard way is to focus on one task at a time and do not allow interruptions. Yesterday during the Webmin addition, I went through an entire series of steps without hitting the final “Create” button. Repetition, repetition and repetition is going to be the only way for me to learn these skills.

Experiences with the Line Command

The pantheon of techno gods must have felt merciful this week, and allowed to me practice my VIM tutorial and line commands without too many problems. I worked my way through the VIM tutorial and it was actually fun, seeing the correct result if the instructions were followed to the letter. It has taken me twice as long to get anything done because I type, carefully compare what I have typed to the instructions, and then hit the enter key. Bruce said the tutorial should take about a half-an-hour, but it took me three hours.

This week I have not been experimental with any of the configuration on Ubuntu, other than exactly what was required for the assignments. It isn’t because I am trying to do the minimum, but instead don’t want to mess up an otherwise successful lesson.

Configuring the Linux files is different, not only by using a line command rather than a GUI, but in what I have configured. My previous experiences with configuring anything on my PC have all been related to "Appearance." I’ve played with the screen resolution to see if I could make the windows easier to read, but went back to the default when the black/white screens left out so much vitality. I’ve substituted different icons for the default icons to easily distinguish between folders, and I frequently change the desktop background. It never occurred to me to go deeper into the configurations and change any of the ways a process works. First and foremost, I didn’t know it could be done. Why would I change something an expert had determined was best for all. Second, I feel so unknowledgeable as to the options, I can’t even guess what I would prefer.