I am a multifaceted woman, living with intention and passion. I always see the glass as half full (ok, almost always). Currently into: jewelry design, glass beadmaking (aka lampworking), visual journaling, cooking and web design everything. Things that bring me great joy: my family, friends, Scrabble, British period pieces, Shabby Chic, Austin, TX, mini art tiles, autographed cookbooks, chocolate, Chianti, pedicures and beach glass. I don't "do" and/or dig: dishonesty, guilt, intolerance, unkindness, drama and goat cheese (it's a long story, but I love all the other cheeses!) So you now have a teeny tiny little picture of me, with a few warts thrown in. Welcome to my world!
My art for yesterday and today is not here. I am helping my youngest create a website. She is taking a class for kids at the college this week and as one of the youngest, is having a hard time understanding Adobe Dreamweaver. I can't say that I don't understand her position, after all, she is only eleven. So we have been spending some quality time with her "TC Gumball" website. Of course, she has the vision of a kid, wants a bright pink background and light pink text, my eyes hurt even now, just thinking about it. I don't want to steer her too much at this age, I just want her to enjoy the process of creating. So it is hard to read, heck, hard to even look at for any length of time, but she is very happy so far. Of course, the good thing about all this is that it is forcing me to practice using Dreamweaver myself, and I realize now that I am going to have to go through my "Dreamweaver Classroom in a Book," text that I bought last year. I bought the book because the instructor was not so great and knew that I would need to teach a lot of it to myself. I get the HTML and CSS, but the program is very complex with so many menus bars and tool bars, I knew I needed to spend more time with it. Now that I am helping my daughter, I see why, I had just forgotten to get to it.
By the way, you can try out the Bubblegum Run Widget she wanted to include on her "Game" page below. If you click the link, you can copy and embed the game in your own page as well, or maybe your child's? It was a fun little thing we found that she wanted to include on her site.
Of course, this all reminds me that I am supposed to be teaching myself Javascript this summer, as well as basic SQL and reviewing C#, Access and XML. All of a sudden I have butterflies in my stomach! I think after this weekend, I will be creating a daily schedule for myself until I get back to school, in about 5 weeks! I have to squeeze in some time to visit my new grandson as well, but I can always take one of the books with me and my laptop...oh, I always have such good intentions!
Prairie Home Companion on Kresge stage in Interlochen, MI
It has been a dream of mine to attend a live taping of Prairie Home Companion (PHC), actually on my bucket list. I was so thrilled that a friend of mine was able to get us tickets, really "good" tickets for the show this last weekend at the Interlochen Center for the Arts in Interlochen, Michigan. We were only a few seats from the front and have a great view of the whole show! My husband and kids and I have been listening to PHC for at least 18 years, possibly longer. We all love the show and try to catch it on our local public radio station each weekend.
Sue Scott, Tim Russell, Fred Newman and Garrison Keillor
Way back when I read Garrison Keillor's "Lake Woebegone Days," and laughed out loud more times than I can remember. This week's guests were outstanding, as usual. A couple of the Interlochen students in particular, including one who played the harp and another who played the violin. The harpist played "Clair de lune," one of my all time favorite classical pieces and then Dave Brubek's "Take Five" with the band, and it was wonderful.
We also got to hear a twosome that we have not heard of before, Storyhill, and my husband especially liked them. Beautiful harmonizing and one of them had a
My son and the Guy's All Star Shoe Band in the background
voice very reminiscent of John Denver. It was a magical night and I still feel as if I dreamed it. We had heard that Garrison Keillor, who is the host of the PHC show, is retiring in two years, so we knew if we were ever going to see this show live, we had to splurge and do it while we could. How lucky for us that he had Interlochen on his schedule this year and that we have friends who were able to get us such great seats! I feel so very lucky, I'll be riding the high from this fabulous weekend for a long, long time! Hot air balloons and PHC, all is right with the world, at least for a little while...
I am not very tidy. I never have been, and it is one of those things that has caused me great embarrassment on more than one occasion. I am better now than I was a few years ago, but I still don't have a good handle on home keeping and organization. Don't get me wrong though, I appreciate organization and tidiness. I love coming home to a tidy house and working in a tidy studio. Cooking in an organized kitchen is heaven. But the time it takes to get it all organized and sorted, well, that is just something I have a hard time putting on top of my priority list. I was very hard on myself about all this a few years ago, but I finally accepted myself and my organizational shortcomings. I bring other gifts to the party. My true friends don't judge me based on the tidiness of my home, thank goodness. And my family loves me and accepts me too. But what does this mean in terms of Web Design you ask? Read on...
Organization is incredibly important in Web Design. Crucial. Programs like Dreamweaver and C# rely on good file organization. Things have to be saved in the same folder within the same file hierarchy every time. You cannot just rearrange documents, folders and files when you have the time. It breaks the paths these programs have created and it causes them to complain and throw out messages letting you know things are "missing," links are "broken" and nothing will work quite right until things are rectified. It is a big drag to say the least. But if you planned ahead, created that first folder in the appropriate place, you would be ahead of the game.
In order to succeed in Web Design and Web Development, I have to be organized. It has to be a top priority. As I create file hierarchies for my classes, I have to plan ahead, anticipating future files that may need folders. The structure of the folder hierarchies has to make sense now and in the future. No more just saving things on the desktop and then relocating them to a more appropriate location at a later date. Tidiness counts in Web Design. I am adapting to it, soaking it up and trying to apply good organization to all my computer files. My brain is being rewired and I wonder if this will affect other aspects of my life? Can organization and disorganization coexist in the same person's head? It would be nice, but I'm not counting on it. Only time will tell...but if I am blogging about my super tidy studio or house a few years from now, you'll know where it started.
Well, it has been basically a month since the fall semester ended, the spring semester starts up tomorrow. I enjoyed my break immensely. There was lots of quality family time, visiting and catching up with friends, "doing" the Christmas and New Year's holidays, creating art, cooking, reading, organizing, cleaning and keeping my blog updated often. I felt all the tension leave my shoulders and upper back shortly after Christmas, when I really had no serious commitments left or due dates looming. But as I sit here typing, taking a break from one last home project that must be finished today, I feel those butterflies returning to my stomach. I don't carry them around all the time, just in the beginning, before I've gotten the syllabuses and heard what the instructors will be requiring for my new classes.
I actually did very well last semester, grade-wise, I got a 4.0, and made the part time Dean's list for a third semester, though I can say I've never gotten a 4.0 before, at least not since high school. Even my college career at CMU never included a 4.0 semester. But I worked very hard for those grades, made a lot of sacrifices because I wanted to understand the materials, programs and concepts well enough to show someone else, which I have always believed to be the true measure of "learning," the ability to teach it to someone else. Dreamweaver is the only problem. I got a 4.0, but learned hardly anything that I did not teach myself in that "Web Design I" class. What a mess it was, I'm still lamenting over the money and time I wasted by taking that class. I did complain, but there was nothing that could be done. I bought a Dreamweaver CS4, "Classroom in a Book," publication and had planned to go through it over the break and teach myself. However, I found that I needed serious down time. I needed to recharge and reconnect with family and friends more than anything else. So now I will take my Dreamweaver book with me to class, and in between classes, I will go chapter by chapter and teach myself Dreamweaver this semester, bit by bit.
I believe that if you want something badly enough, you have to just go get it and not let a bad experience keep you from achieving your goals. In the past, I would have felt like I was the problem, incapable of learning the complexities of the program, but luckily, with the passing of the years, has come real wisdom and insight. I can actually see where the real problem is, assess my own abilities and limitations and rework my plan to get what I need. Sadly, I watched many of my classmates, most of them just out of high school, struggle and eventually give up on that class. I showed anyone who asked or who I sat near, whatever I could to help them, but there was so much we didn't learn, it was frustrating for everyone. But as I've said before, I'm on a mission. I want this more than I've wanted anything for a very long time. I want to work as a web developer, comfortable with the coding side and design side, for the rest of my life, as a career, as a way to make a living. So I'm dedicated to this mission, extremely focused and will not be deterred by any obstacles, whether they are external or of my own making. I have to add that I am so passionate about this area, I have loved everything I have learned to date and cannot wait to learn the rest! Bring it, BRING IT!!!!
So things have been insane for me since I started back to school for my second semester in September, which is evident by my lack of time or energy to post on my blog.But yesterday, I turned a corner. Why? How? Well I'll explain. My web developer classes have been kicking my booty all semester, very challenging and time consuming to say the least. On top of that, I was worried that, although I have dreamed about becoming a web designer for ten years, once I took the classes I would find that either 1.) I am not intelligent enough to understand the material, or 2.) I would get the material but find that I didn't "like" it after all. Until yesterday, those two fears were still lingering in the back of my mind.
The day started off normally enough. My first class at 8 a.m.(I am not a morning person for those of you who do not know me personally, so this is a rough start to any day for me!) is Web Design I, where I am learning how to use Adobe's Dreamweaver CS5 program to create and publish web sites. Up till now, I have been very disappointed with this class. The instructor is not familiar enough with the current version of this program and we have not had enough hands on time to really get immersed and get comfortable with it. However, yesterday, she shifted gears and gave us our final project (actually, our only project), which was to come up with ideas for a web site and to create a simple sketch of each idea. Then, as I thought about what I would like to do and then sketched my four different ideas, I went back over them to figure out what my limitations would be in executing each idea. And as I visualized what it would take to turn my sketches into web pages, I realized that I could execute all of them, that I knew enough to actually bring those designs to life in the way I imagined them! I actually know enough now to be quite dangerous!!! It was a wonderful epiphany. But it gets better...
My next class is right after at 10:15 a.m., Introduction to Computer Programming Logic and Design. In this class, we are learning about programming logic and design using a program called Alice, which eliminates the syntax issues involved in actual programming, to help us learn the basics of writing good code. As the instructor was going over the solution to the homework we turned in, I realized that the solution he was showing had many more lines of code in it than what I had turned in, even though my program worked just fine. Then he said there was another solution to the problem and showed us that piece of code, but again, this one had several more lines of code than my solution, which had only one line of code. I was really feeling bummed out that I had not "gotten" this solution. But then, he said there was one more way to write the code to solve the problem, "probably the best way," is a direct quote, and then he wrote out what I had come up with on my homework!!! I could have flown to the moon and back! I'm getting it, I'm getting it, I'M GETTING IT!!!! That is all that kept running through my head, lol, and this feeling of relief and joy. Relief because I am getting it, and joy because I love it! Champagne all around...but wait, there's more...
My last class of the day is at 5:30 p.m. and honestly, it is the most difficult. It is Interactive Animation, where we have been learning to use Flash CS5, Fireworks CS5, Soundcut Pro and lately, a little bit of Java with the action scripting 2.0 portion of Flash. There is soooo much homework in this class, a quiz every week that requires a re-creation of some sort of animation, exercises thrown in here and there, that also require creation of some animation, and then we have a big project always looming, since the beginning, each of which takes hours upon hours to complete. The instructor lectures almost from start to finish for two straight hours and crams so much information into that two hours, that I always feel like my brain has been used for "kick the can" by the end of the night. Sometimes, after this class, I go visit my friend Julie to unwind, and she can verify that I have been basically incoherent after class at times. But I digress. During last night's class, the instructor was showing us how to add action scripting to buttons to make them do certain things. At one point however, she ran into a problem and had to come up with a solution on the fly. Her solution involved creating a second button layer in the timeline, which is really not something you want to do. In my head, I thought I had a better idea and while she gave us a break so she could create a solution, I created my own solution and not only did it work, but I did not have to create a second button layer. Talk about icing on the cake, with sprinkles and even a cherry on top. My brain is connecting the dots. I understand most of what my instructors are talking about and if not, know I can figure it out between my textbooks and online resources. My questions are about things two steps ahead and based on combining what I have learned in all three of these classes. And I love, love, love it all! What a day...I'll be riding this wave for a very, very long time. Christmas? Nothing for me Santa, I'm good!
