The Actors	Mark	Sue	Clint	Lisa
Job	Printer	OTA	Yardwork	None
Relationship	Husband & Wife		Son	Daughter
Age	46  &46		15	12
Favorite sport	climbing	X-C skiing	BMX jumping	soccer
Grade Point	3.94	NA	3.833	3.833

11-28-99

This is Sunday morning after the long Thanksgiving weekend. Well it wasn't that long for me since I worked my usual 11 hours on the day after Thanksgiving. Still, this has been the first two days off in a row I have had since September 20th. I just woke up from an interesting printing nightmare.

I was back working again for the only printshop that ever fired me, P. Press here in Tacoma. They were bigger and busier than ever. I went in at four P.M. after school. I had to cut my stock but the cutter wasn't working. Dreams get a little fuzzy in their logic. For some forgotten reason, I had to rotate it 180 degrees to get at a part that needed adjusting. I finally got it working and cut a partial order of my stock. Then I couldn't remember how to run the press. Everything was changed around from when I used to run it. There were cabinets for storage where the inner workings used to be. On the sides and the top, it still had rollers and ink fountains and lots of knobs and controls. I don't remember if I got it working. I do remember the whip cracking foreman telling me I wasn't really supposed to start working until 5 P.M. There was a bedroom with a bed next to the press. I took a one hour nap under the smooth white sheets. When I opened the door, I was in lots of trouble.

Still in the dream, I tried to wash off the dried up ink while the harassing foreman asked me how long I was going to be. People in management kept walking by, making the usual snide remarks about how slow I was and how it was absurd to call myself a press man. I finally finished that press and was asked to clean up a Didde press in another area. That took a long time as well because I barely know how to run a Didde press. When I finished that job, the day foreman had gone home. I was considering walking out and not getting paid when another foreman came by and picked up a slip of paper from the table. He looked at it briefly and said,

"Well, you've been here since 4 P.M. and worked until 7 P.M. That looks like 3 hours."

"That's not quite right," I said, "I slept from 4:30 to 5:15, so you only owe me for 2 hours and 15 minutes.".

"Well, that is very admirable of you to admit that." He said.

He walked me up to billing where we waited nervously to get the attention of a group of fat, Mafia types who stood around in white shirts and neckties murmuring about some mysterious printing conspiracy.

I woke up then. There were more details about stress and harassment but that is enough for you to get the picture. I woke up feeling on edge from the nights sleep. I spent the entire day on this computer yesterday. I was working on two large Powerpoint presentations. One on Searching the Internet and the other on color correction in Adobe PhotoShop. One is 11 slides and the other 21 slides. One also has two 1.5 Meg AVI files in it which is actually the easy part. The other slides are illustrated with the standard printscreen and edit method not to mention the animated type and don't forget the drop shadows and custom hand made colored backgrounds.

I am thinking I should go for a bike ride this morning. I can see a long day of sitting at this computer ahead of me. All of these projects are due on or about December 6th for first quarter finals. Still untouched are the group powerpoint on animation, a postcard and a greeting card featuring me in a famous place made digitally, the final cut up image map table project and the shutter speed/filter photo assignment which I have partially complete. It is so much easier to sit here and whine about all this work than to actually get started.

I checked my mail this morning and was pleased to get an email from my old friend T. We met in the 5th grade at the registration desk for new students. He is my oldest friend, and actually one of only friends since, sadly, I can count my friends on one hand. Like most grade school friends we have drifted apart over the years after high school. Some of the tales I could tell about our adventures in high school would shock even the "Days of our lives" crowd. Back when I was still a bum he went to boring accountant school and now has an excellent job as a CPA at Boeing with over 20 years seniority. He is married to a lovely optometrist who he had the good fortune to meet on a ferry boat ride a few years ago. Talk about a story book romance.

T. and I used to jam with guitars back in the day. We both were in garage bands although his was far more succesful, playing in taverns around Olympia. Later, we used to jam, just T. on his electric base and me on my blues harmonica. He kept up the music with another of our grade school friends, eventually forming a tight band and recording a cassette. His group won a competition of Seattle area bands and toured some eastern European country, I think maybe Bavaria. Before we had kids, he and Sue and I used to go hiking together in the Cascades. The music that kept us close doesn't seem so important anymore. I really don't understand why that is. I rarely play my Martin anymore and I rarely see T. either. We are planning a get together over the Christmas break. Should be fun.

11-27-99

This is the longest I have gone without making an entry in my journal since I started it in March. There is an old bumper sticker I have always been partial to, "Life is a bitch, then you die". I am going to amend that to, "Life is a bitch, then you go to college". The end of the quarter is 2 weeks away. I have enough homework to last me 4 days of continuous computer time, from wake up to lay down. I can't afford to dawdle here at the keyboard writing scintillating prose about my exciting(?) life. The only news worth reporting is a new pill I have discovered, an herbal supplement.

I was at the health food store talking to the man about my dizzy spells. He suggested I try Ginger pills. Everything my doctor has given me has been a complete flop. I was getting a dizzy/vertigo spell every three days for the last two months. Since I started taking 3 Ginger pills a day, 8 days ago I have not had one spell. Unfortunately this disease does tend to be extremely unpredictable. It may have gone into remission on it's own. The doctors don't know what causes it or cures it. They will happily cut your head open and hack away at various parts of your ear and brain in an effort to cure it. Thanks to Internet forums and a good book, I have discovered that these operations have a less than 60% success rate after 5 years compared to doing nothing

A tip from my brother John:

Create a shortcut on your taskbar by right click dragging desktop shortcuts to the taskbar and selecting copy here from the pop up menu, Windows 98. Back to the homework grind for me.
11-22-99

I lied. This is actually not Monday but another entry for Sunday. But, I will be to busy to write on Monday. This journal is a good escape from homework. Today Lisa and I went up into the sunshine and took photos for my assignment for my photography teacher on shutter speeds. She ran towards me in the sunshine as I took photos with various shutter speeds demonstrating blur and panning. Down at the house I used my polarizing filter to take photos through the front window with reflections and, by turning the polarizing filter, without reflections. Then I had a little tantrum about how I was overloaded with stress and homework. It's always great fun to storm around the house, knocking things over and making a mess. When I was done with my tantrum we drove down to the mechanics where I had left the car. Fortunately they hadn't got to it yet because when I checked the lug nuts, they were loose. I had almost lost the wheel while driving home in the dark rainstorm last night. Thank god I parked it at the mechanics instead of driving home.

After that I was in a much better mood and Sue and I went out bike riding. Tonight I have been working on my PowerPoint presentations. I have been having problems using the Printscreen-Shift image capture technique in PhotoShop. I down loaded SnagIt and was so impressed with it I whipped out my credit card. You can even capture AVI files with it. For example, I am doing a PowerPoint on how to color correct in PhotoShop. Now, I can capture the AVI motion movie instead of 10 printscreens. Of course, I can also capture printscreens with SnagIt but the options are far superior to the simple printscreen Mr. Bill Gates offers with windows. Ok, enough delaying, back to homework.

Oh, by the way, here is our latest table assignment. Try to code this without looking at my source code. I dare you.

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11-21-99

Sunday morning. This is my day to relax. I don't have to work, I don't have to sit in a classroom and take notes, I don't have to drive all over half the county commuting between home, school and my job. I get to see my whole family all day. I get to watch Sue waltz around the house, pretending that she hasn't missed me. I get to help my son with what ever his projects are: usually either a broken brake cable on his BMX or trouble with his latest weight lifting routine. And Lisa will sit on my knee as I work on homework at this computer.

Goodness, I almost forgot Birdy. He is preening his feathers on my wrist as I type. Such a silly little spoiled cockatiel. We have done a poor job of training him. The natural instinct is to give him attention when he screams. In fact, while he does need at least a couple hours of attention a day, he must learn to play with his own toys the rest of the day. But, even though I have tried to educate my family about his nature, they insist on picking him up the moment they get home from school. This has made him a very spoiled, manipulative little screamer. We all seem to like him just enough to not give him away to someone who will give him the discipline he needs. Whenever I am home and he screams, I give him a ten minute time out in the dark closet. He comes out humbled and agreeable.

Just now Sue dropped a pot out in the kitchen. It startled Birdy and he leaped off my arm and fluttered to the floor. Instead of climbing back up my leg, he waddled out to the doorway to the kitchen and peered around the edge into the kitchen, watching Sue curiously. Seeing no danger, he seemed puzzled about how he came to be on the floor. He uttered a few little squawks and looked from me to Sue, hoping for a free ride. Instead I called him over from the computer. He ignored me at first, then seeing I was the best offer he had, waddled back my way. When he got close, I put my finger out in front of his little chest. He eyed it carefully with his head cocked to one side. Apparently it looked safe for he stuck out his foot out tentatively, like a man shaking hands for the first time with a new acquaintance, and I lifted him back up.

I have about ten different homework assignments to work on today. I also need to drive up to the mechanics where I left the 82 Toyota last night and make sure that the scary rumble I heard last night wasn't just a loose lug nut. I have a nasty feeling their $700 clutch job went bad.
11-18-99

I have had a pretty busy week. I worked until 10 or 10:30 the first two days. Yesterday I left at 9 PM even though I had enough work to last until 11 again. Tonight I got off at 8:45 which is the reason I have energy left to spend on this journal. I am finding that I need to conserve my strength carefully working and going to school like this.

Our html teacher was absent today. We only have her for one hour today so she picked a good day to miss. Our other two teachers have been dumping homework on the 14 of us like it was going out of style. Finals are coming on December 10. The projects are large Powerpoint presentations demonstrating: how to use the PhotoShop tool bar, a 20 to thirty slide Powerpoint on a chapter on both Animation and Images from a classroom book, and both a greeting card and a postcard created entirely in PhotoShop. We are supposed to demonstrate our creative abilities mixed with our digital art skills. Frankly, I am too tired to feel very creative. I can handle the trouble shooting html problems with ease, but the creative digital stuff I get stumped on over and over. I try to think of creative things to do with filters and light sources in Photoshop and I want to barf.
11-14-99

Today is Sunday. I have finally got up to 40 hours of work. This is the first time I have got a full week in, at work, since school started. Up until Wednesday I was working my usual 5 hours a night after school. I had a four day weekend at school so I was able to sleep in, do homework in the morning and work 7 hours in the afternoon Thursday and Friday. Saturday I went in at 9:30 AM and worked until 10:30 PM on 5000 copies of a four color over four color church brochure on heavy gloss coated cover. Our image setter (makes the negatives from the digital files) is either outdated or out of adjustment depending on who you ask. The plates I was trying to print from had streaks and holes in the image areas. The entire prepress and stripping departments were of course gone on Saturday, which put me in quite a fix. Fortunately this isn't the first mickey mouse pre-press department I have worked with. I was able to manually scratch off the streaks and fill the holes to the satisfaction of the "retired" owner who took it out for the ok from the salesman. Then I had to change both blankets as usual for a large, full coverage four color job. By then it was noon and I had 24,000 impressions to go on my first pass of four to complete the job.

But now I am home for the day to work on homework and hang with the family. Clint has just bought some more dumb bells. These latest ones are the one arm kind where he can attach different weights on the little hand bars. His arms are truly getting magnificent. And he is only fourteen. I don't think my arms have ever been that big.

Lisa and I have been making burning type in PhotoShop. I have been learning the neatest tricks in school for custom built type. Here are some links to custom type building tips.

1. feathered type
2. chrome type
3. metal panel with four 3d buttons

What makes this even more exciting is that these are things I am learning in my first quarter of school. Next quarter we start advanced PhotoShop.

It is kind of a shame I have to spend my only day off doing homework. At least I get to see everybody. Sue and Lisa are making cookies. We will go for a walk soon. It is pretty tame compared to my old life of climbing or painting every dry weekend. In August school well be over. I will have a new day shift job as an entry level web designer. Then I can pick up the life I left behind in September. It should be pretty fine.
11-11-99

We have a four day weekend at school. I still have to work of course but not having to go to school at eight in the morning is quite a relief. I am writing this as I wait for my modem to download dinosaur pictures. We have to make a CD cover at school as a demonstration of our growing skills in Photoshop. I am getting terribly spoiled by the high speed T3 backbone connection we have at school. What takes 5 minutes at home takes 2 seconds at school.

It is very nice to have the family around. We all have today off (me just in the morning since I work afternoons) even Sue's school gave her Memorial day off. She and I never get any time together anymore. We sat around together before the kids got up and snuggled. I am so lucky to have such a wonderful woman. My old climbing partner Dave emailed me to go climbing over Thanksgiving. I hated having to tell him that I was going to have to back off climbing at least until spring when I might have this dizzy disease under a little better control. He took it pretty well. Fortunately he has a girlfriend now who even climbs a little. That should keep him busy.

Menieres disease:

I had a fairly scary dizzy attack at school on Tuesday. I felt it coming around 11 AM. Went out and took my seasick pill. When I came back in and sat down I sat anxiously programming html as I watched the hands of my stopwatch move toward the one hour point when the pill takes affect. I got dizzier and dizzier. When lunchtime arrived I could just barely walk steady. As I lumbered down the hall way, another student approached me in the narrow hallway and looked askance at my drunken walking. I could just see him thinking, "Boy, you web people are strange!"

When I got out to the car I was deathly afraid I would start vomiting. Whenever I closed my eyes, I felt the world start to spin. I tried to focus on the road out in front or the raindrops coursing down my windshield but the movement made it worse. Instead I focused on still objects on the dashboard and settled in to wait with my bucket between my knees. About an hour later, I was able to walk back into class and cautiously go back to programming. No vomiting thank god. I can certainly see why Van Gogh cut off his ear. I feel another bout of pressure coming on as I type. Hopefully it will be over and done with before I have to go to work.
11-7-99

I thought of a way to easily update the journal link on this online journal. Each month I have to go through all 22 pages and change the <A HREF> journal links to reflect the changing month. Put more simply, if you visit my site in November and click on the "journal" link, the hyperlink will take you to the November entries. However, if you visit here in December I will have had to edit all 22 "journal" buttons to reflect the new month. It had turned into a stressful 30 minute deadline job, or a ninety minute job if my modem crashes and deletes a directory.

My new idea is to have each journal button point to a staging page whose name will never change. I plan to call it step.htm. Now, when the end of the month rolls around and I am stressing about making the house payment on my part time "going to college income", I will only have to edit a few links on the step.htm page. Every "journal" button on all 22 pages will still point to the right place, the step.htm staging area. I will make the page very small, perhaps just my journal warning message and an enter button so it should only add a couple seconds to the access time.

I had a bad night Friday. Thursday I saw my doctor who told me I had been being too restrictive on my low salt diet. I went out and treated myself to a smoked salmon pasta salad, thinking that at least it was smoked instead of soaked in brine. I am afraid it was both. Friday the class went on a field trip to the Seattle Art museum. I wandered around for an hour looking at all the nice photos from the famous photographers like Ansel Adams and that Alfred Steiglitz guy who shot a lot of photos of his wife, the painter Georgia O'Keeffe. We are studying photography in our web design class so it should have been interesting for me. I knew, as I studied each exquisitely framed photo that I should have been thinking about lenses, camera angles, field forces and filters but instead I found myself reflecting on how weak photography is compared to painting. My teacher and the other students seemed fascinated by all the photos. Try as I might, they just didn't move me.

Just as a test, I walked up to the fourth floor to see the paintings. Wow! What an inspiration. The Jackson Pollock sucked as usual, but the 400 year old Van Dykes took my breath away. There are at least 3 there. Each is 6 feet tall and features members of the Dutch aristocracy from the 1600's. It is hard to describe the impact of those masterpieces. I could have sat and stared for an hour at each piece. There is also a moody Rubens that is really just a color sketch for one of his ceiling frescos. Any one can become a very good photographer with enough time and training. However, to become a good enough artist to where people will pay good money to hang your paintings on their walls you have to have, not only time and training; you have to have talent. And talent, I am beginning to believe, is a gift from the big guy upstairs.

Anyway we had a fun trip, other than getting bored by a bunch of photography. Our teacher is a very charming former owner of a video production studio and extremely knowledgeable about all things pertaining to the camera. She also is pretty funny as we found out when she drove our nine passenger school van up and down four levels of a parking garage designed for compacts. She had to back and fill several times on each of eight ramps. It was quite entertaining hanging my head out the window and hollering "stop!" or "You're okay, another 8 inches, plenty of room." In addition to the smoked salmon the day before I also was eating my gorp which had chocolate chips and nuts, another risky food.

When I got to work I felt the dreaded dizzies coming on. I took my seasick pill but it didn't work. I never got vertigo but I did lose my dinner violently and had to punch out two hours early. When I showed up in the morning Saturday all smiles and healthy, M. had done all my work as well as his own and I was unable to make up my hours. We are going to be broke big time this month. But at least I had a long weekend. This is Sunday and we are taking Clint and a friend into an Indoor BMX track where they have wooden ramps the kids can practice their jumping. Sue and I will go walk our old North end hill while he beats himself up on the ramps. Lisa got invited to see Disney on Ice with a friend. I miss the days when we all used to hang out together. Kids do grow up though. They want to be with their friends.
11-4-99

I am so proud of myself. I managed to update all 16 or so pages on this site to reflect the new month. It is only a half hour job but on my schedule of work and school, a half our is like a weekend would be for most people. I saw my ear doctor today. He is disappointed that I am having to take a seasick pill every 2 to 6 days. He had hoped we could control the dizzyness with just the low salt diet and the diuretic. If it was his life he said he would have the sack decompression surgery which he just happens to do. He showed me a skull on which the surgery had been performed. They clear out a big open mine pit in your skull behind the ear. Right where the bony protrusion behind the ear is they take out that mastoid bone leaving a cherry size hole in the skull. At the bottom of the hole is the endolymphatic sac that acts kind of like a infected abscess in a tooth and causes Menieres disease. By thinning the bone on the wall of the sack, the sack has room to expand and not press on the balance nerve which stops the dizzy attacks. That is my memory of the procedure as he described it anyway. I am sure I have slaughtered all the medical terms.

I said I didn't want to get cut on yet and he agreed that I could hang on for a while to see if the attacks die down in frequency. He said he would never push me to have the surgery, but thought it looked like it was in my future.

School is still lots of fun but lots of work too. I would right more about it but instead will just post our most advanced html table here for any geeks who are into html. I wrote and tweaked this code over the last week before I handed it in for the quiz. I have the teachers code too now. It is much cleaner and while I should post it here instead of mine, I feel it wouldn't be too ethical since N. is a professional, where as I am just a student. If you want a programming challenge in tables, code this one from scratch without looking at my code until you are finished. That was our assignment in one of our nine classes. At least a third of the students still hadn't figured it our a week later and handed in incomplete tables. It is quite a challenge.

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