3-31-00

Hey hey hey, Friday night is here! I have gone 6 days without an incapacitating dizzy spell. A record for the last few weeks. Thursday I had a lite one that passed with barely a serious interuption of my concentration. Around 8 tonight, I had another light one that didn't really even make me dizzy. I worked through it no problem. I felt a little bit unsteady hopping around the press but was rock solid driving home. Now I can tell it will be a light one and even ate some leftovers. I had a pretty good day considering I stayed up into the wee hours writing code and only got 5 hours of sleep.

Math class is quickly getting scary. His lecture this morning was about how b cubed equals the cube root of b cubed. He also illustrated how ten to the zero power is...zero? I finally was able to get past the long line at the bookstore to buy my math textbook. Now I can study. I am hoping to once again, for the first time in 28 years, get A's in math again. See, you really can return to the past. The girls are just as pretty. Only now I am old enough to be their father. I catch myself appraising the slender ones, thinking what fine examples of womanhood they are. Until I catch a glimpse of the face and realize that while the body is mature, the mind isn't far from being a child. Merely by being in college they are all far beyond the intelligence I had at that age.

I still wonder what went wrong for me back then. And how I can prevent it happening for my children. Last night Clint was giving Sue and I a lecture on the evils of white flower and sugar. I couldn't believe my ears. I read, and was persuaded by, that same nutrition advice when I was 17. Now here he was, lecturing us about it. He knows I don't eat donuts and sweets. I asked him if he was going to start building a tipi next like I did. Naw, he said, he was't that far gone.

I am fortunate to sit between two very bright students in class. They both help me out a lot when my brain fogs up. I suppose we all help each other. It has been fun watching the charming G. on my right go from not even knowing how to upload her files to a server to building a page complete with image maps, Director movies, handmade Imageready animations and frames. Here is a link to her page. She is originally from Turkey, speaks at least 4 languages, has at least one college degree and has seen a big part of the world. It is nice to have someone so kind learning beside me who shows up every day with a positive atitude about this daunting task of mid-life career changing. And yes, G. I did put my latest CSS resume online.

3-30-00

I am about as stressed out as I ever get. It is 8 PM. I was so frustrated when I got home I didn't have the patience to eat my salad with a fork. I stuffed it in with my fingers as I read code. My day started going downhill when I woke up with a bad ear. I am 2 days overdue for my every other day dizzy spell. N. chose this morning to give us some more hectoring about how we were sucking at Cascading Style Sheets. I am tempted to count all the new words and codes involved in learning how to even define CSS much less put it to use. There is over a 500 new words and lines of codes we are supposed to not only memorize but use in our code. She gave us a ridiculous internet search last quarter that was so hard most of us found the source page and cut and paste most of the answers. Now we are trying to learn it in earnest. Out of about 40 questions, I understand 10. The first ten. My learning style is read it and try it. Once I have mastered it, I read and try the next thing.

We got let out of school at noon for reasons so ridiculous I will not mention them here. I called in to work to see if I could start early in order to leave early. They were happy to have me. M had to leave at noon. He said I should be able to finish by 5 no problem. He figured it was 4 hours of work for him, 5 or 6 for me...I have never been a fast pressman. I told him that I wasn't promising anything. I had to leave after my usual 5 or 6 hours. He said he would stop by or call between 5 and 6 to see if he had to return and finish the job which was due two days ago. It was a nicely designed 4 over 4 on matt cover. Lots of pretty builds and a lovely set of photos for a plastic surgeon's brochure. The problems I had with the job are too numerous to mention here. Mostly a lot of little things involved in getting a lot of wet ink through the press without compromising quality. By 6:20, I had called his house twice with no word from the turkey. I washed up. I truly detest printing. My fingers stink like salad dressing.

3-29-2000

Spring break is over tonight. I had planned on getting to bed early. I even got up at 8 AM instead of 10:30 or ll to prep myself. But, as luck would have it I had to work late finishing a little nightmare on the Komori two color 28. Our rookie salesman told a customer we could make a perfect PMS match with a four color build. By the time I got there at 2:30, M. the day Komori press operator was just finishing up a tint overprint of magenta on the build to redden it up a little. He had already flunked the press check on the last pass on the four color side. I washed up the tint pass, re-madeready the black and yellow and had a perfect match, thanks to G. and M.'s careful troubleshooting earlier in the day. The back side was two simple solids, Warm Gray 8 and PMS 2595. It wasn't a perfect match, PMS to the build, but no one was there but me to nit pick. All the profit from the job was long gone...I ran the thing. Like the goof ball that I tend to be when tired, I forgot an inch of paper. I noticed I only had 40 overs on 2500 sheets but spazzed out on where they might have been. So I guess M. can re-ink and finish them out if he has time. I left late enough as it was.

Sunday was lovely. Sue, the kids and I plus two of Clint's riding buddies all drove down to Olympia for the afternoon to spend some time with my folks. The three boys love to ride their BMX bicycles over all the concrete around the state capital buildings. They jump all the curbs and stairs. My dad, Sue, Lisa and I walked downtown and around the lake. I rollerbladed and had a great time, if a little slow, stopping to wait all the time while they caught up on foot. Lisa was in a strange mood and decided to play chicken with me. When I was about 70 feet away, she started running toward me. I was cruising pretty well on my blades, pretending to ram. At the last second, I realized with horror that she wasn't giving way. We collided violently and my larger mass drove her onto the sidewalk where I fell on top of her with all my armor. Sue and my dad were a bit shocked but Lisa thought it was hillarious. Crazy kid....I am going to miss seeing them. I have to get up at 6 AM. That's 5 hours away.

3-26-2000

I had a dream.

I was down in Smith Rocks climbing. I was on a trail going up the side of a steep gorge above a stream. There was grass growing on the side of the gorge. There was a climb going up the cliff on the side of the gorge. When I stopped and looked up at the climb, my attention was caught by something odd on the side of the cliff. There was a line of underware hanging on a series of clotheslines that came out of a cleft in the steep ground. I looked closer and saw that the cliff was arching out over the ground like a plate, leaving a clearance thick enough to sqeeze into and extending quite a ways along the ground. This clearance soared vertically upward for about half a rope length, or 80 feet. The clotheslines were anchored in the middle of this narrow space amongst a pattern of carvings in the ground. I looked closer and found that the carvings in the bank were a form of writing and symbols. There was meaning in the symbols. I could read laughter and sorrow. They had carved a huge map of their life into the dry clay bank, protected from the weather outside by the thick shelf of cliff arching overhead. It was hard to read parts of the story though the large mass of spiderwebs woven between the cliff and the clay bank. It looked to be quite old.

I could analyze this dream but it might spoil the suspense. Besides Dr. Freud has a headache this morning.

Part of the reason I can bare my soul in here is my belief that only strangers surf this site. Unfortunately, sometimes my friends come through here, despite my warning. Yes, I do have a few friends. Not that I ever get to spend time with them...but in my previous life I used to have free time where I could climb and paint and spend time with friends.

I finished my taxes last night and sent them off without triple checking the entries. That has me a little worried. I was dizzy during the first data entry. I did the e-file thing that costs twelve dollars and requires no paper work. We are getting a fine bundle back. I can pay off all our credit cards and have enough left over to pay for the rest of tuition. If I didn't make any mistakes...

3-24-2000

I have been having fun in Photoshop. I am trying to divide up my free time during this spring break between all the programs I will be studying next quarter. Yesterday wasn't too pleasant in the morning. I felt a little dizzy but started in to work by way of a few errands. When I got to the barber, I realized I was in for a more serious dizzy spell. I sat out in the car for an hour while the bright, sunny spring day spun slowly before my eyes. Didn't barf though...I am learning to count my blessings. Once the worst of the little spell passed, I got a haircut, an allergy shot and headed in to a 9 hour shift where I really kicked some printing butt.

When I came home I logged on to a Menieres disease forum. Most of the people on the forums are a lot more affected by this disease than I am. They appear to go to the ER rooms when they have attacks instead of going out to their cars like I do. All I have ever needed was a bucket. Many have had surgeries that appear to not be very effective over time. Anyway, I need to get out of here and go to work.

3-21-2000

I have nothing but good news to report tonight. School is out for a week. I got all my assignments handed in on time. I assume I got at least straight B's if not better in all classes. Even better news is my health. I am off that lousy scopalamine patch that was giving me a horrible dry mouth at night and double vision during the day...not to mention making me dopey. My ear doctor was so right when he said my first priority was to quit relying on it every day. I stopped taking it Friday and only barfed once on Sunday breifly. Today I felt my ear going ballistic as it does every couple days. I got stupid and couldn't concentrate on my screen for a half hour. Then, slowly I realized it had passed the worst point without ever getting even moderately dizzy. The whole time, I was sitting in a class room of around 20 stressed out students, putting the final touches on my 64 slide powerpoint show. As I realized I was going to escape the attack, I felt like I had just dodged a torpedo with my name on it.

By the time I left at 3, I was feeling on top of the world. The sun was out and it felt like summer. I was even glad to see G., my foreman at the print shop. I ran a few jobs on the old KORD. It hardly ever runs anymore now. The driver uses it for a desk. In fact, I pulled a peice of cake out of the ink rollers before I turned it on. I am thinking seriously of changing this site over to Cascading Style sheets. Frames and mouseovers are so common. I need a challenge. But first, I have to do my taxes.

3-19-2000

I am sorry to report that I had a vertigo spell this morning. I may have to let my doctor try some of his magic tricks on me. I have really had it with this Menieres disease. But now it has passed and I am back to homework. I finished the 64 slide powerpoint presentation on Rock Climbing for my Interactive Courseware class, along with the 8 slide structure map and 64 slide matching storyboard. Boy, the internet is really slow this weekend. I am watching a simple page load for the third try as I type this in notepad. Simply absurd!

Sue and I went for a walk yesterday in the rain on a quiet gravel access road to a powerline nearby. She is great company and a fast walker. This going to college and working doesn't leave much time for exercise. She and my son have been running together during the week while I am at work after school. He is well on his way to being an excellent athlete. She says he runs so fast she can't even keep up on the mountain bicycle they take turns riding. He has also been tutoring her in lifting free weights. They make quite a pair. Lisa seems to be ignoring the whole fitness craze. She is more concerned with painting her nails, tieing up the phone talking to friends and sketching the lastest fashions from her teen mags.

I need to get to my homework. I have a CD cover to create in PhotoShop and import into Freehand, not to mention refining my CSS resume. I wonder if I will be able to upload today at all. They must have water in the phone lines today.

3-17-2000

I get a two day week end. Told my boss I had too much homework. Saw my doctor today who advised me to get off the seasickness patch. He said if I needed it everyday, I should consider medical intervention like the ear surgery or the shot of gentamicin. I had a good day in class. Here is a link to my latest in progress Cascading Style Sheet web resume. A warning, it may work poorly in Netscape if you have an older version. I need to get off this computer and hit the sack. I have two full days to finish finals which are due Tuesay. Does anyone know why I am getting these corrupted icons. I am wondering if it is a bad video card. Mine has 16 megs of video ram and 128 megs of regular RAM on my Pentium II 350.

3-15-2000

I had a cool day today. At 8 AM this morning in my Communications 108 class we started our final presentations. The first guy up for his 10 minute final speech was a former Special Forces Ranger who is now in the telephone program. He demonstrated rappelling from a fixed point. I assume that means not from a moving point like a helicopter. He had monkeyed his way up a ceiling rafter to a point about 30 feet high yesterday and hung his rope. This morning he batmanned up the rope, not using his feet, until he could twine his legs around the rafters, hanging upside down like a bat. Things got a little tense then as he struggled to get his rappell set up. He had reassured Mr. G that he would be perfectly safe the entire time. Nothing could be further from the truth. From the moment he left the floor he had no back up system of any kind. As I watched him struggle upside down with his rap set up from my desk on the floor, 30 feet below, I worried about how badly he would get hurt if his strength gave out and he had to bail. If he wasn't so macho, he could have asked me to bring an extra belay rope. Sadly, I can remember being every bit as macho when I was in my 20's. He rapped down without incident and received a good round of applause.

I was the third speaker with my 10 minute speech on "why you need a homepage". I felt reasonably good. Before the speech I was joking with Mr. G about how I needed some tape to tape my pockets shut. He has complained about my hands in pockets style of speaking. Sure enough, I put them in there for the first five minutes. One of my friends said I should have brought along some sand paper to put in my pockets. That would have been perfect.

After that we all trouped over to N.'s class for a long html session of Cascading Style Sheets. She gave us a page of boobytrapped code and told us to "play" with it until it looked the same in both browsers. Whenever something is really hard like that, I get a bad attitude. I have this critic in my head that tells me I will never be a programmer. The guy beside me, G., had it working beautifully in both browsers about an hour before I did. It is frustrating to sit beside someone that brilliant. N. liked both of our work so much she xeroxed our code and passed them around the class room. As we were leaving, N. complimented me on my code in the CSS assignment.

"What do you mean?" I said,"G. did it first."

"Yes, he did," she said,"but he used two different pages of code, one for each browser. You did it with just one page. You were the only one to get it. Good job!"

And it was. Now if I could just be a little less pessimistic while I was coding, I wouldn't have the headache I have now, 12 hours later.

3-12-2000

I am so sick of homework I am ready to scream. Friday night after work, Saturday morning and Saturday afterwork and all day today, Sunday I have been cramming for upcoming finals week. I am making good progress on all fronts except the most advanced html stuff. She has dumped 3 chapters and an online search about CSS. Cascading Style Sheets appears to be the latest new fangled method to format text. Unfortunately it is not yet supported by Netscape. Things that look wonderfull in bill's browser look goofy in Netscape. I had a nice visit with my son the BMX master after the whole family,except me of course, went into town for a walk and ride . He had lots of fun jumping and showing off his tricks in the "big" city. I also helped him set up a hotmail account so he could have a private email account. We have until the 20th before the end of the quarter. I have no idea why our html instructor gave us such a huge chunk of stuff to teach ourselves. This CSS stuff is frustrating.

3-9-2000

A classmate in my communication class got hired at Microsoft today. She is a fairly bright and outspoken divorced twenty something who sits in the back row with a couple other renegade hecklers. I have always liked her because she is cute in a chunky sort of way and seems sincere in her attendance and desire to learn something from our crusty old Mr. G. We have had a 50 percent drop out rate in that communication class. She has been studying programming for 3 years here at Clover Park Technical College and definitely knew way more than I do about languages and operating systems.

I felt a minor dizzy spell coming on while I was at work tonight. Thank goodness it turned out to be a light one. I was able to keep working. Yesterday there was a major fatality accident on the Narrows bridge. It took Sue 3 hours to get home. It was still bad when I came through 10 hours after the accident. A logging truck lost a wheel and veered through oncoming traffic into a propane tanker.

I have been thinking more about my internet speech on Wednesday. I have broken it down into 4 catagories. The first one is also the title of the presentation which is 60 percent of my grade:

1. Why you need a homepage
2. Design tips to raise your page above the riff raff
3. How to get it for free
4. How to make it easy to find

3-7-2000

I have been remarkably healthy lately. My tricked out ear has only made me dizzy once or twice in the last 8 days and those were minor spells where I was able to remain at my work station. I got home early tonight because a customer requested I match the ink color of a printed sample perfectly and I was unable to come up with a formula which would do so. I got real close but it was a run of 10,000 sheets of high grade paper. To run that many sheets for a picky customer I wanted it perfect. Besides, I spent so much time doctoring the mix, PMS 1807, I would have had to stay late to finish the job and it wasn't due until the 10th.

I have to give a presentation on the 16th on "why you need a homepage" for my final project in Communications 108.

You need a homepage if you have a story to tell or a product to sell. In the pre-internet days, if you had either, you had to print up business cards and brochures. Printing costs big money. And the people searching for what ever you have to sell may not live close enough to get any of your printed advertising.

The internet has gotten as big as it has because you can find stuff on it. It doesn't matter what you are looking for, you can find it on the net. The flip side of that coin is that it doesn't matter how exotic or unlikely the product you are selling is, if someone is looking for it, you can make them find it on your homepage.

If you know nothing about the net, I recommend buying "Creating Web Pages for Dummies". It is written in non technical jargon and the author has a sense of humor which you are going to need. These books come with a free CD full of software that will help you learn the basics of homepage design. If you read that book an hour a night for a couple weeks, you will have a homepage up in a month.

Another great thing about the net is that your homepage can be free. If you have a dial up connection, your server should allow you a 5 meg site. If he doesn't, get a better server. Even if you don't have a dial up account at home, you can get a free site at places like geocities.com. You will have to have access to a computer where you can install a free downloadable shareware version of an uploader program like CuteFTP or WS FTP. But after the site is up, you can get your email from the site at the library.

I will work on this speech later, I have to make 63 storyboard powerpoint slides by Thursday.

3-4-2000

Saturday night and my week is finally over. It doesn't feel like it but I did get a break this week. Tuesday we didn't have any school after my morning class. Our main building was taken over by several hundred teachers in a Transition to Trades seminar. I volunteered with the video crew for a couple hours until they realized they didn't need help and sent me home. When I called work in the afternoon, they didn't need me either. I don't remember Wednesday. Thursday and Friday I worked until ten thirty PM. This morning I was so tired I didn't get into work until noonish. Clint and Sue are here but Lisa is off seeing a play in which her girfriend acts. We sent some of the money my dad gave us for the kids education off to one of those online day trading outfits. My foreman at work had been doing it with this company for a year with good results. I am thinking of buying some Microsoft stock. I don't see how Bill can go wrong. I wish I had some exiting or thrilling tale to tell here. My life has been painfully boring lately. I'm not looking forward to doing homework all day tomorrow but at least I can work at my own pace.

3-2-2000

It's Thoisday. One more day of school left this week. I had a real rough night of printing tonight. I started on the 2 color Komori. It had to be changed over to perfecting from straight printing. This is a procedure where we unbolt some large parts of the press in a certain precise order, then rebolt it together again so that the press goes from printing 2 colors on one side of the sheet to printing 1 color on both sides of the sheet. When I got to the third step in the procedure, I couldn't move the bolt I was supposed to be able to move. I wiggled it, I jiggled it and it wouldn't move. I puzzled over it for a few minutes until I caught site of a reset button covered with a protective shield. I didn't have anything to lose, (I thought) so I pressed it thinking it would act like the reset button on my computer. Bad mistake!

It flipped out the electronics. I called the day shift guy but he was avoiding me. This was a job that was a must for tonight. Next I went over to the smaller 2 color Heidelberg GTO. It started up fine as usual. When I got to the end of the run, I was 300 sheets short. G. never makes mistakes like that and I searched the room over and over to find the missing sheets. Finally I called him at home. He had read the ticket wrong and run an even 6000 intstead of the 6300 written on the ticket. I had to put the other two plates on and rerun his missing 300 sheets.

My life isn't all gloom and doom. I am happy to report that I haven't had a dizzy spell in around 6 days. I think I might be approaching a remission in my latest round of Menieres disease. I have also been making excellent progress on my 60 slide interactive courseware project. Due to the time crunch, I am having to steal climbing photos off the net in order to fill out my show. But since it is just a school project that will be tossed as soon as it is graded I am bending my ethics a little. As I type this I am trying to watch a streaming video. At school on the T1 connection it looked very nice. Here at home it sucks big. Time for bed.

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