Class Starts

The first three weeks of class has been nothing short of a drenching. From the fire hoses of instructors has come a tsunami of knowledge through which only now am I learning to swim. Since the classes are all primarily vocational in nature, as opposed to academic, repetition is key. Figuring out how much repetition is enough to learn, say, the syntax of the printf method (a Java programming thingee that formats what the user sees on the screen) or to become familiar with the lasso tool in Photoshop (great for rounding up pixels that need to be included when selecting one apple from many in a photo) is just as important. I could, and have, spent hours selecting and extracting objects from a photo, only to find it was too much; I should have stopped and move on. It’s all just too much fun.

The most visible of my classes for you, the reader, will be Dreamweaver and XHTML. The former is Adobe’s development tool for web sites and the later is the coding language that governs the layout of a web page. I have a web site: RuppOnline.net, where all of my Dreamweaver assignments are posted. The method for turning in assignments is not turning in paper, as those of us who attend school in the last millennium did, but to post to the web site. You see what the instructor sees. I am starting to join the 21^st century. I have latitude to add other items to the web site, so long as it is kept separate from the Dreamweaver assignments, so results of Photoshop, Illustrator, and maybe even Java will appear there.

Right now, all you will see is Lab 1, a simple set of web pages with things one typically finds on the Internet, such as text, images, video, and music. I’m working on Lab 2, which adds some more features and should be operational by the end of the day tomorrow.