4-30-00

It's 6 AM on a Sunday morning. I usually don't wake up early like this. The last thing I remember last night was sitting at the kitchen table at 10 working through an endless chapter on multiplying negative integers. The letters on the page started to blur and I was surprised to find my head laying on the table. Yesterday wasn't too bad for a Saturday. I rollerbladed in the morning between writing bills. I still have quite a bit of money left over from my tax refund. I'm saving it for the car. My 82 Toyota has 220,000 miles on the original engine. That's a lot of miles. Still, it's in better shape than both of my other cars at 220K. Both the Gremlin and my minivan went 220K on the original engines. But the van got pretty pricey when it got old. At the last we were pouring money into the old beater at an astonishing rate. I won't make that three thousand dollar mistake again.

If I get serious today I should be able to wrap up my homework in 12 hours. Most of the other people in class aren't working. I can't even imagine how nice that must be to go home and do homework everyday. They probably have weekends free... I started keeping an online journal 13 months ago when I read a review of the best personal homepages in the Seattle Times. Jessamyn.com got first place. I still surf by every now and then. Yesterday I noticed she had gotten interested in the lost art of letterpress printing. I caught that bug in the sixth grade. I'd had a paper paper route for several years and was looking for something easier. My buddy Ted told me he was quitting his printing job to work for his step dad. I applied at the Sherwood Press and found Jocelyn eager to take on a new printer's devil. Her main business back then was printing funeral announcements for the three funeral houses in town. She would hand set the type each day and print the announcements. When I got there after school she would have 30 pound trays of hand set type for me to break down. It wasn't just the type I had to put away. Each announcement measured about three by four inches. In between the words and the sentences were the spacers and leading that gave shape and body to the lines. When I think about the trouble we used to go through to lock up pages full of hand set type it amazes me. Even after I entered printing school and began learning more modern offset printing methods I can still remember being amazed at her typesetting skill.

As the years went by I saw less and less of Jocelyn. Life pulled me away from the little print shop on the hill. In one of my infrequent visits she showed me a job she had printed where the customer wanted the type to print in an arc. That is, she wasn't able to lock it up in a straight line before putting it in the press. She spent hours and hours painstakingly locking up the 50 letters of type in an astonishingly intricate perfect arc about 3 inches long. She was so proud of the accomplishment that she saved the lock up to show visitors. I was quite amazed. Pride in craftsmanship is a rare thing these days. Now, I can accomplish the same thing with software in 30 seconds. But in the lost art of Letterpress printing, she was, and still is a master.

I dropped in to see her a few years back. She and my dad, both in their late seventies, sing in the same Masterworks choir. But where Dad has retired, she has merely slowed down a little, only working 3 days a week. But the shop is the same. Same crowded little vacation cabin packed with the tools of the printing trade, circa 1935. She still has the open fireplace burning for heat next to the cans of press cleaning solvent. The moldy shake roof is still covered with moss. We sat talking about life in general and job satisfaction as it relates to printing. At the time, I was working in Seattle running a four color computer console press. She mentioned how some of her friends sat at computers all day. She felt that their lives were poorer for not producing a tangible product they could hold in their hands. At the end of our day, we could pick up the jobs we had printed and admire our work. Printing is a very tangible thing. I still enjoy a job well done.

4-29-00

My dizzy disease is becoming more bearable. About once a day I get a little dizzy for a couple hours. Not bad enough to where I can't drive or work or study, just enough to annoy me. The only thing I can compare it to would be a recurring mild Migraine headache. A lot of other people who have this relatively mild version of Meneires Disease say that the first year is the worst. I am about 7 months into my first year. Stress and lack of sleep are also contributing factors in managing this odd condition. When school is out in August and I start my new career, I should be able to get a lot more sleep. There will be stress on the new job no doubt, but I will at least have a normal amount of free time after work and on the weekends to relax. Maybe I can even start painting and climbing again...What a concept! Now, I have no free time at all. But that's the price one pays for working through college. I take two pills a day: a diuretic, (anti water), and an antihistimine called Claritin that my allergy doctor gives me. Ialso take a bunch of vitamins pills every day which may or may not be helping: 3 ginger roots, 1 manganese and a C. Compared to how it has been in the past, this is quite tolerable. I suppose if one has to aquire a disease, this is a relatively friendly one.

4-28-00

I am pretty proud of my first Flash 4 movie. It represents around 16 hours of hand drawing and animating. I plan to put it on my company's web site if and when they ever give me enough content. Math class is becoming a problem. He has a bad tendency to wander off into hypothetical number crunching that is way over my head. He has given us two extra credit assignments so far. Both of which totally stumped me.

This latest one is to figure out what the probability is that two people would have the same birthday in a class of 35 people. It sounds like a simple matter of dividing 2 by 35. Oh no. He filled up a black board with math. Huge exponents and mysterious calculator keys. His kid came in today...maybe he was simply showing off. He usually takes little steps that I can follow. He must figure he needs to keep the math geeks challenged by giving them something to chew. All it does to me is shoot down my self confidence. I have to go in to work tomorrow for a couple hours. It looks like a light weekend for homework. It'll be nice to have enough free time for some exercise.

4-26-00

I had a pretty good day. We had our first test in Algebra at 8 AM this morning. I was quite nervous, almost shaking with anxiety. Once I saw how easy the questions were I calmed down. The marathon cramming I've been doing paid off handsomely. We've gone a month without handing anything in. All he's done is stand up front and lecture. He asked us to work the assignments in the book but not to hand them in until today. It's an odd style of teaching but it seems to work. I think I got all 10 questions right. I may have even got the extra credit.

After that a bunch of us web students went to a career fair at a nearby college. What a joke! There were 40 different recruiter tables there for unskilled jobs as baggage handlers, entry level cops and firemen plus the Army. There wasn't a high tech employer in sight. Our web teacher has been making encouraging noises about the upcoming openings for interns here in Tacoma. I don't really feel ready but she has a lot better grasp of the situation. I asked her if it would be bad to get hired before I graduate in August. She said if I turn down a $20 an hour job just to stay in school, she would flunk me out anyway for stupidity. She is one sharp cookie.

I learned how to put in the time stamp today. We are exploring Javascript...not just how to cut and paste but how to write it from scratch. It is almost as much fun as Flash. Time for bed, I've been going 18 hours straight.

4-21-00

It has been an interesting week. Everyone has been staying until 3 at school while we finish viewing the "5 good and 5 bad" web site choices of each student. With only two students left to show, it looks like about a quarter of the class has good taste. When I mentioned this to our teacher, she reminded me that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A site that really turns me off could be perfectly aimed at it's target audience. Some of the younger crowd no doubt thought my choices were hopelessly tame. I was surprised to see the class beauty picking sites that appealed to me. She is in her early twenties but has excellent taste. Her favorite site was Evian.com. Here are my choices for the:

I am a bit tired out from the long week. My dizzy disease has been paying me visits every other day. I am able to study and work though it but the effort of concentrating while dizzy can be exhausting. I wish I could figure out why I am on a two day schedule. Symptom free every other day.

4-17-00

I have been fighting off a bad dizzy spell since noon. I managed to get through my classes and showed up for work, only to be told there was nothing to do. That is the third day in a week. We are coming up on some lean times, our budget has no room for unpaid days off. I went to the Allergy doctor to get a shot. When I walked out of the building I could feel vertigo setting in. Although I never barfed, I had to rest in the car for a hour until the worst had passed. This is some pretty scary stuff. 2 hours later I still feel some minor dizzyness.

I think our teacher has finally realized that her policy of allowing students the freedom to work at home during lab times is causing problems. Today she asked for a show of hands of the students who were having difficulties understanding any of the stuff covered so far this quarter. Almost everyone raised their hands except for me and one or two others who stay at school full time until 3 oclock everyday. She commented on the pattern she is seeing between those who leave early to study at home and those who raised their hands indicating trouble with advanced concepts.

By staying at school during lab time, those of us who do stay get a lot more instruction. It is not that she answers questions all afternoon for us. She has work to do as well. But just the fact that she is there, if I need her, for the odd question is quite a moral booster while wrestling with hard stuff. I usually make it a point not to ask for help. I learn more when I figure it out on my own. If they all start staying, I will miss the quiet relaxed lab time we have had the last 6 months. On the other hand, if they do stay, they will get smarter and we can all move ahead together, faster.

Some of them have explained that they can't concentrate as well in the lab as they can at home. I enjoy the challenge of working in a crowd. It's good training for our upcoming job in a room full of designers. If we can't handle the low pressure school environment, what's going to happen when we start apprenticing under a master? Even if we're self employed, customers can be the worst bosses of all. There is stress and noise in any job. Where better to adapt to it than in this classroom while there's no paycheck involved?

I had a pretty nice weekend. Saturday I worked from 3 PM to 9:30. During the morning I played around on the computer doing household bills and other things that weren't directly related to upcoming homework assignments. By the time I headed into work, I was chastising myself for not getting any exercise. Even though I drive over the Narrows bridge twice a day I never tire of the view down the 20 mile fetch South toward Olympia

The whole way in I carried on an inner argument with myself about whether I should go straight to work or get some exercise first. I got to thinking how I have been putting homework and my job before taking care of my body. Exercise won. I came off the bridge and pointed my old beater toward the North End hill. I have been walking that hill since 1976. It calms my mind better than a double Martini. I had pretty good day at work running a four over one job on glossy cover stock.

Sunday I wallowed in Trigonometry for 4 hours then spread out the rest of my night amoungst Flash, Javascript and CSS. I did go for a bike ride to see how my new dog deterrent works. As expected, the large bull dog came charging out for blood as I pedaled up the hill past his driveway. I whipped out the full auto plastic bb gun and gave him a short burst. As they all zinged past him (lousy aim) it was comical to watch his head whip around. He seemed to think they were some new little bees flying by. My next burst landed a couple on his face. He whined uneasily, like he wasn't quite sure what was going on. He had definitely lost interest in attacking me on the road. On the way back down the hill, I had my hand on the gun in the carrier, but he didn't come out. I spied him hiding, out of range, down the long driveway. He was watching me intently, near the shelter of a garage. That's one smart dog.

4-15-00

I think I know why I like writing in this journal. It is a quiet time for me. When I walked in the door at 10:30 PM tonight I was expecting to find a sleeping house. To my delight, I found Clint at the computer, writing a Hotmail letter. I took him out to the garage where we shot my new full auto bb gun. I bought it at cheaperthandirt.com. It is called a soft air mini machine gun, MP5A5 and sells for an unbelievable price of 29 dollars delivered. It's all plastic and looks like a one half scale Kalasnikov toy cap gun until you pull the trigger and see the little plastic bb's coming out at full auto. The technology is being adopted by police and military for live fire training exercises. The soft air mechanism that propells the bb's is also used in full scale, all metal completely functioning assault rifles as a means of familiarizing trainees with their weapons in live fire exercises. Only the guns shoot the fairly harmless bb's and cost anywhere from 600 dollars and up. I can't believe how well this little thing works for 29 dollars. Now maybe I can persuade the bulldog on my bike ride to stay in his yard. I have wasted a full 20 dollar can of grizzly bear pepper spray on the persistent bugger. He is smart enough to run just out of reach when I spray him. I think I have got more than he has. The old saying, "Don't piss into the wind" also applies to pepper spray.

We have been having some stressfull days at school. Flash had everyone, including myself, freaked out over conquering the motion path menu. Our teacher had turned us loose, figuring we were smart enough to wade through the tutorials built into the software. Then she got sick for a day. Meanwhile, we had been beating ourselves up over not being able to get past some poorly worded phrases in the tutorial. When she came back and heard how much trouble we had, she went home and worked till midnight building a very thorough tutorial from scratch for the following morning. She walked us through it while trying to demonstrate on the lousy 40 inch monitor she has for teaching. About half the class still couldn't get it. The person next to me tapped me on the shoulder for help at the most confusing part, when I was just barely following the logic myself. I had to ignore her or fall behind myself. She is a brilliant coder, but like most of us, gets impatient when she stays up till midnight trying to make something work and failing. She stood up and began the usual whining that I myself have expressed about how we need smaller, incremental assignments, not these big leaps. Our teacher, clearly frustrated at her inability to teach us this complicated procedure despite having stayed up late working on the problem, lost it. She said some things that I am certain she regretted. As soon as her lecture was over, she came around, as she always does, and did some one on one coaching with the people who hadn't "got it" and soon we were all happy as clams at low tide with our new found skills.

As is true with most things in life, I am finding that the techie stuff that is hardest to learn is the most satisfying to master.

4-11-00

Bad news and good news. First the bad news. I didn't work the last two evenings and may not work tomorrow either. We are in a slump. Or, as my boss said, "We have hit a little bump". Now, don't get me wrong. I love time off. I have been able to wallow in the two new homework areas we have this quarter: JavaScript and Flash 4.

I am head over heels in love with Flash! Nothing I have learned about computers yet has excited me as much as Flash. I hated it until I bought a decent textbook: Essential Flash 4 for Web Professionals by Lynn Kyle. Now, I don't have to wade through endless poorly written online tutorials. I can turn the pages of the book, scrutinizing each word and coming back over and over until I get it. I like Flash even better than Photoshop. Photoshop is and Imageready are still. Flash moves. If you want to see some of the cool things it can do, go to Macromedia's web site and click on Flash, then samples. I came home after school yesterday and worked the lessons in the book until midnight. Our teacher N. was gone today so I continued working on the book projects for most of the day.

It is so cool to learn from a well designed, step by step manual. I have spent far too much time using the shotgun approach to learning...try 10 different things and hope one of them works. It is a huge time waster. Javascript from scratch is turning out to be really exciting too. I have been trying to make a mouseover appear away from the mouse for 2 years. I learned today in under an hour by working the examples in our Javascript textbook. Another great piece of news is our tax refund. It is so big I was able to pay off both credit cards, my next and last quarter of school expenses-tuition and software-with a solid 900 left for emergency car repairs. But, the best news today is I get to go to bed before 12:30 for the first time in about 6 days. It is 10 now and I am fading fast with no homework to keep me up. I wish I had some depressing news....Happy journals make boring reading.

4-9-00

I really shouldn't be writing here. I should be doing homework. It is 1 PM and I still haven't down any serious homework. Everyone left, even Birdy. I am really getting sick of that cockatiel. If I had the time I would re-read the bird manual to figure out how he got so spoiled. They can be trained to not constantly scream for attention. It would need to be a family wide effort. But I am always gone and they don't have the discipline to read the book. Anyone want a free bird?

This morning I reworked my printing page. I took out the old stolen gif and substituted two pictures of me back in 97 running the four color. That was the job that broke my heart as far as printing is concerned. What a perfect job! Day shift on a state of the art press earning 18.50 an hour working three thirteen hour shifts a week. Toward the end of my 5 month employment there, our 6 color pressman quit. I worked double shifts for 3 weeks until they found a replacement. He cost so much they had to cut corners somewhere and picked me. I decided to bag printing altogether and paint for a living...which lasted until my money ran out in 6 weeks. I had 12 marvelous paintings, a profitable show scheduled in 2 months and 3 days worth of food. End of story. Here I am back in printing. But at least now I have solid plan to become a web designer. I don't especially love the field, but then I don't love printing anymore either. They are both advertising related. At least web design will be day shift and moderately creative. Not to mention a state of the art skill that is constantly changing. Unlike printing that uses skills I Iearned 25 years ago and has a very low profit margin. I need to buckle down to homework.

4-8-00

I had this great idea. How about if I write journal entries in Notepad? This will force me to pay more attention to correctly spelling my words. My html editor, Hotdog, has spellcheck and autosave. I have been taught to avoid it. Something I hadn't foreseen was a browser crash. I had a full page of lovely prose typed up here and lost it all.

Some of the high/low lights:

• Sitting in the sun at lunch today was wonderful. No one else has discoved my little windfree alcove. The sun beats against the white building and the gravel. I pulled up a piece of plywood to sit on and let the burning orb heat me up. Just exquisite! I had forgotten how important quiet time is to my mental health.
• Didn't get home until midnight from my double shift of school and work. Got some nice compliments from my classmates and teachers on my lastest CSS resume. Some of them are saying I have the best page in the class, but that could change at any time. We have some brilliant people. I have to bust my butt just to stay even.
• Our pre-press guy is leaving to become a web developer in Seattle for 3 times what we were paying him. He is self taught and well be writing PHP code at rblc.com. Don't go there. It crashed my browser.
• Kicked some butt at work tonight. I was running solids and duotones on both units of our GTOZ on two different sigs. Dried too slow to back up tonight. I well have to go in tomorrow morning to back up. Shouldn't take more than 5 hours if that.
• Woke up from a scary dream last night to a scarier reality. The bubonic plague was french kissing me. I have no idea how he got through all the locked doors, but here he was in bed with me, his tongue in my throat...wait, wake up dummy, you are having a dizzy spell. I spent a depressing hour out in the garage with my bucket but never lost my cookies and went back to bed. I really like trigonometry. We have to figure out how to find out what 365 to the 365th power is without locking up our calculators. Time for bed.

4-6-00

I woke up early. I rarely write before school. I have been up late the last two nights. Last night I was up until 1 AM working on homework code. Which works out to 5 hours of sleep. Tuesday night I was ready for sleep around 10 PM but my ear went ballistic. I got dizzier and dizzier until my tiredness was replaced with fear. I had eaten a big dinner when I got home at 9 PM. I really didn't want to toss that many cookies. By the time I went out to the garage with my bucket at midnight I had resigned myself to a charming session. I tried a different tactic this time. I laid flat on my back on the electric treadmill for an hour. It worked like a charm. That is, I didn't barf.

After an hour, I tried to stand up to go to bed...bad idea. But still, I never barfed. That is reasonable progress for me. With this disease, and all it's unknowables, I am happy with anything other than barfing. One of the 2 year students paid me a nice compliment yesterday. He said I, and G. on my left, were the best coders in the class. G. on my right, a two year student, is coming up fast. There are 3 of us in a row that seem to excell in hard coding. We enjoy wallowing in it for hours. He also mentioned my odd tendency to do well in the artsy end as well. I am thinking about making that my new logo...a round peg in a square hole.

4-3-00

I had a long weekend. Saturday I worked 9 hours. Sunday I studied even longer. Today was Monday. I got let out early from work, ran a few errands and came home to do math homework. I like math. This is some low form of Trigonometry. Our teacher has a masters and a doctorate in applied math. He also worked for the State of Alaska doing some kind of wildlife/prey analysis using fancy math for 20 years. He seems to have a tremendous amount of integrity and kindness. We were all pretty surprised to see him show up a half hour late this morning. He forgot to set his clock ahead for daylight savings time. He didn't look like he had blushed in quite some time. I have been having big connection problems with my service provider, Alternate Access. I think it worked better before my friend A. let them take over the maintenance and billing.

The other class finally got their computers up and running. It is amusing to see them starting out where we were 6 months ago. They seem like quite a sincere group. My back hurts. Time for bed. I won't be able to upload this tonight. Living in the sticks has disadvantages.

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