Reflections from the Texas Hill Country

This blog is about my reflections concerning my many interests. The last time I counted, I was interested in approximately 2,777,666,555 things.

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Name:
Location: Marble Falls, Texas, United States

I am an instructional designer at Austin Community College, Austin, Texas. I have taught computer classes for the past eight years. I have master's degrees in business and instructional technology, and I am thinking about pursuing a master's in psychology. Some day I open to begin work on a Ph.D in online education. I am an experienced web designer and my hobby is pencil sketching.

Saturday, September 30, 2006

Web Standards - Part I

Several years ago I attended the computer show at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas. One of the featured speakers was Jeffrey Zeldman, who has been designing web sites since 1995. Mr. Zeldman is the publisher and creative director of A List Apart (www.alistapart.com), an online magazine for web designers. He and Eric Meyer, the stylesheets guru, founded An Event Apart, a conference on standards-based design. An Event Apart held its last show of 2006 in Austin on September 27. In 1998 Zeldman cofounded the Web Standards Project. Molly Holzschlag is now the de facto leader of the Web Standards Project.

I am going to do a professional development project on web standards, so naturally I bought Jeffrey Zeldman's new book, Designing with Web Standards, Second Edition (New Riders: Berkeley, 2007). This post is a brief introduction to web standards, focusing on what they are and why they are needed. Other postings will explore the subject in much more detail.

Only a few years ago there were no consistent standards for websites. A site that displayed correctly in Internet Explorer would not display properly in Netscape Navigator, and vice versa. Netscape JavaScript would not run in Internet Explorer, so Microsoft developed its own version and called it JScript. JScript would not run correctly in the Netscape browser. Web designers had to spend lots of time and tons of their clients' money developing separate versions of the sites they built so they would run in both browsers.

This is why Jeffrey Zeldman and a few other designers founded the Web Standards Project. The web standards this group, the World Wide Web Consortium, and all the major browsers now support are: XHTML, XML, CSS, ECMAScript (standardized JavaScript), and the DOM (Document Object Model). Other posts will examine each of these technologies in depth and explain why all web designers should follow them.

Resources:

Jeffrey Zeldman's home page - www.zeldman.com

The Web Standards Project - www.webstandards.org

Happy Cog - www.happycog.com

A List Apart - www.alistapart.com

An Event Apart - www.aneventapart.com

Eric Meyer's home page - www.meyerweb.com

Molly Holzschlag's home page - www.molly.com

Wikipedia article on Web Standards

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Air Travel Now Safe - Passengers not Allowed on Planes

Yesterday, Captain Bleu Sky, President of MACCAs (Make American Commerical Carriers Absolutely Safe), announced that beginning January 1, 2007, no passengers would be allowed to board any domestic or overseas flights of American commercial airlines. He went on to say that this is the only way air travel can be made completely safe from terrorist attacks. He informed the press covering his news conference that MACCAs considered several other approaches before taking this drastic step, such as:
- Banning all carry-on luggage
- Banning all luggage
- Banning men between the ages of 18 and 75 from flying on commercial aircraft
- Banning all persons whose surnames end in either a vowel or consonant from flying,

but banning all passengers from boarding aircraft was the only measure that would make flying totally safe and that would not be considered discriminatory or profiling.

Captain Sky wants to reassure the traveling public that they will still be able to purchase plane tickets and book vacation trips; they just will not be able to use their airline tickets. To quote the Captain: "In this age of cyberspace and virtual worlds, is physical travel really necessary? Would it not be much better to take virtual trips and virtual vacations? You can reserve lodging at a five-star resort and simply stay home and view your resort on the Web in the comfort and safety of your own home. You will still be able to pay the full cost of your virtual vacation as though you were physically going to travel to your destination, without having to put up with all the hassles of packing, unpacking, driving to the airport, standing in long lines at the security counter, getting sunburned, over-eating all that great resort food, etc. I definitely think that actual, physical travel will soon come to be seen as a relic of our decadent distant past."

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Starting a New List at Walmart

The other day I posted a message about several things that annoy me at Walmart. After Friday's visit to a local Walmart I have to start a new list. Friday afternoon I stopped at a Walmart on the way home from work. Evertything was fine until I checked out. The cashier was very busy so I helped her by putting some of the plastic bags full of merchandise in my shopping cart. I interrupted this to take out my debit card and pay for my purchases. Instead of placing the rest of my bags in my cart, she started checking out the person who was behind me, so I had to put the rest of my stuff in the shopping cart.

She was checking out the other person so rapidly I didn't have time to put my debit card in and the $20 cash I got back in my wallet before I put the rest of my plastic bags in my shopping cart. I had to hold my debit card, my receipt, a $20 bill and my temper in one hand while I finished loading my cart.

I'm sure after my next trip to Walmart I will gather material for another post next weekend.

Saturday, September 23, 2006

100 Pounds of Cats and Eight Dog Feet

I am single, but I don't live by myself out here in the Texas Hill Country. I share my home with twelve cats and two small dogs. Thye are my fourteen children. For thirteen years I had a thirteenth cat named Bobo. Bobo died just a few days ago. I don't know how old she was because she was a grown cat when she showed up at my former home in 1993. Bobo had six kittens, and I kept them all. I still have three of them: Arthur, Caesar, and Taliesin. They are twelve years old.

My oldest cat is named Jihan. I don't how old she is because my sister bought her in the late 1980's, kept her for a few years, and gave her to me. Jihan is an Egyptian Mau, a domesticated wild cat the Egyptians have been keeping as pets for over 3000 years. She is gray with black spots.

Fauve, whose name in French means wildcat, is well-named. She is a large, hot-tempered brown tabby and is part Maine Coon. She is thirteen years old. My other seven cats are much younger. Three of them: Zorro, Carmella, and Dulcinea, are brothers and sisters. They are about six years old. Dulcinea is black, her brother and sister are black and white.

My four youngest cats are the kittens of Zorro and Carmella. They are about five years old. Mordred is a small black cat. Morgan, Vivienne, and Merlin are black and white.

I have two dogs who live in the house with the cats and me. Frodo is a fat little black pug. He is two years old. His best friend is Arwen, a four pound Chihuahua. She is seven months old. Arwen and Merlin and Vivienne are good friends. Most of the other cats tolerate Arwen fairly well, except for Fauve, who hates all dogs. Tal (Taliesin) and the puppy fight all the time. He beats the daylights out of the fiesty little dog, but she keeps coming back for more. Later, when I have time, I will add photos of my fourteen children to this post.

Friday, September 22, 2006

"Windows" No Longer In Public Domain"

I'm afraid I've got some bad news for you today. You are going to have to come up with another word to describe the holes in the walls of your house that you have always used the word "windows" to refer to. Microsoft has just announced that it has secured a copyright on the words "window" and "windows" after a lengthy legal battle that cost it four years and approximately $4 billion dollars. At first the US Office Copyright Office was only going to issue the bully boys of Redmond a copyright on uppercase "Window" and "Windows," but the Microsoft mouthpieces eventually prevailed, and now both upper and lower case versions of the commonly used terms are copyrighted!

The objects in my house formerly known as windows henceforth will be known as "portals to the outside world." I'll bet my readers can come up with something even catchier. The question now for me is, will the zealous guardians of the Microsoft reputation (after the Windows Vista decacle which seems to have been a long-running news story of the past decade, you'd think Microsoft's reputation has been permanently trashed!!)find this article and threaten me with a huge lawsuit if I don't remove this posting?? If this post disappears from my blog, you will know that's what happened!!

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Blogging: Learning Tool in the Constructivist Classroom

This is the second in a series of postings on the use of blogs, wikis, and podcasts as tools for the constructivist learning environment. In this article we will briefly review the history of blogging and discuss how it can be used as a learning tool by teachers who believe that students learn best when they construct their own learning.

The word "blog" is short for weblog. A blog is an online journal, or diary, that is formatted as a Web page when the blogger writes a posting to it and publishes it. There are several types of blogs. Blogs are often classified by media type, device, genre, or whether they are public or private. If you want to find blogs on your favorite topic, you can use a blog search engine, such as Google Blog Search. The number of blogs is increasing so rapidly it is impossible to track them accurately, but according to David Sifry, as of August 2006, there were over 50 million.

What makes blogging such a powerful tool for the teacher who believes in constructivist learning? I'm glad you asked. Joyce Seitzinger, in her article, Be Constructive: Blogs, Podcasts, and Wikis as Constructivist Learning Tools, discusses how blogging facilitates reflection and authentic discourse. She goes on to say that blogging can help create a community of learners who enthustically engage in the task of creating learning. Many students complain about the lack of social interaction in the online classroom. A class blog facilitates the development of a social presence in the online classroom.

Let's take a briefly walk through the history of blogging. Blogging evolved from the online diaries kept by early diarists such as Justin Hall. Two other early bloggers were John Carmack and Matt Drudge, who created the Drudge Report. Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" in 1997. Peter Merhloz coined the short form "blog" in 1999. One early blogging site was Xanga. In 1997 it had only 100 diaries. By December 2005, it had 50 million. Evan Willians and Meg Hourihan started Blogger in 1999. Google bought it in 2003. You can read more about the history of blogging at Wikipedia.

Okay, now that I've convinced you to start your own blog, your next question is, "Who will host it for me?" You can either host your own blog on your server or website, or you can find a free hosting service such as Blogger. If want to host your blog yourself, you might want to consider these blogging tools:

Wordpress
Greymatter
Movable Type
Typepad

I use Blogger, because it fits my needs for a blogging tool extremely well. It is very easy to use and has all the features I need at this time. Elizabeth Castro has written a book titled, Publishing a Blog with Blogger, that covers everything you need to know about blogging. Other free blogging tools and hosting services are: LiveJournal and Edublogs. Edublogs is a free blog site for educators.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts as Constructivist Learning Tools

This is the first of many postings I plan to write on the use of three new tools - blogs, wikis, and podcasts - in education. In this article I will define constructivism, as well as blogs, wikis, and podcasts, and list some links to websites where you can learn more about constructivism and these three tools that assist the teacher in creating a constructivist learning environment.

Every few years a new learning theory ending in the suffix "ism" captures the attention of educators and is favored by them until the next hot "ism" appears on the scene. For at least the first sixty years of the Twentieth Century behavorism dominated both the worlds of psychology and learning theory. If you want to learn more about it, go to Wikipedia and look the term up. About 40-45 years ago the cognitive learning theory of Jean Piaget became popular. Piaget was a Swiss developmental psychologist who spent most of his long life researching how children learn. Unlike the behaviorists, Piaget recognized the importance of the mind in creating learning. Please look him up in Wikipedia if you want to learn more about him and his work.

Constructivist learning theory builds upon cognitive theory rather than refuting it. Piaget is considered the father of constructivism as well as cognitive learning theory. My own definition of constructivism is that people learn best when they construct their own learning. Wikipedia has an interesting article on constructivist learning theory. My intention in this posting is to introducethe three tools mentioned at the beginning of this discussion that can enhance constructivist learning.

First, let's define blogs, wikis, and podcasts. Blog is short for weblog. A blog is an online journal displayed on the World Wide Web. A person who wants to set up a blog can go to a website such as Blogger and set up a blog in a couple of minutes. After setting up the blog, the blogger simply types his or her posting in a simple text editor that functions as a simple word processor. When the blogger finishes a posting and publishes it, the blogging software formats and displays it in a web page.

A wiki is a website published as a collaborative by a group of people who share a common interest. It allows information to be organized for easy access, either in a database or in files. Please see my posting on wikis if you would like to learn more about them.

A podcast is an audio or video file broadcast on the Web and received on the user's computer or some sort of mobile device such as an iPod or other MP3 player or cell phone. Audio is recorded in MP3 format. The next article will discuss how blogs or wikis or podcasts can enhance constructivist learning.

Here are some resources where you can learn more about constructivism, blogs, wikis, and podcasts:

Constructivism



- Wikipedia article

- Piaget, Jean. (1950). The Psychology of Intelligence. New York: Routledge.

Blogs and Blogging



- Blogger Website

- Wikipedia article

- LiveJournal

- Edublogs

Wikis



- Wikipedia - The best-known and largest wiki

See my posting on wikis for more references

Podcasts and Podcasting



- Wikipedia article on podcasting

- Wikipedia article on RSS

- Odeo

- Podomatic

Saturday, September 16, 2006

Just a Poor Wayfaring Stranger Lost in Walmart

One of the things I'm interested in is how people find their way through the world and how people search for things. I am mostly interested in how people navigate the World Wide Web as they search for whatever they need on it. I spend a lot of time studying theories on how to design websites that make navigation easy and intuititive. Many of the principles for designing navigation in cyperspace also apply in the "real" world.

I buy almost everything I need at Walmart. This morning, for instance, I gassed up my truck and had it serviced, got a long overdue haircut, and bought the groceries and household supplies I need to get me through the upcoming week, at my local Walmart. I have shopped in my hometown store so many times that I could find my way around inside it blindfolded. I mean I used to be able to navigate effortlessly through the store, fearlessly piloting my shopping cart around or through merchandise stacked at the ends of the aisles, elderly shoppers in wheelchairs, kids playing touch football in the sporting ggods department, lovers embracing in the cereal aisle, etc., etc.

They have just rearranged almost everything in the Marble Falls Walmart. The store is much more open now, the aisles are wider, and it seems much larger. That is all good, except that this morning it was like trying to find things in a store I had never been in. I always pride myself on never having to ask where something is in a store. To me it is humiliating to have to ask a sales clerk or stocker for help. This morning I had to ask where something was twice.

The most important thing I had to buy today was trash bags. Once I was actually on the aisle where they are now shelved and left that aisle and walked across the store and spent several minutes looking for them hundreds of feet from where they were. That was one of the times I had to ask for help. By the time I walked back to where I had started looking for the trash bags, I was mad at myself for being so stupid, mad at Walmart for rearranging their merchandise, and mad about having to spend all Saturday morning shopping at Walmart when there was so much work I needed to do in my house.

One of the things I really love about the Google website is the sparse simplicity of the home page and the fast accurate results I get when I search for something. Please don't change a thing Google!!

Thursday, September 14, 2006

A Short History of Computer Viruses


The subject of today's blog is computer viruses, focusing on what they are and what you can do to keep your computer from being infected by them. Wikipedia defines a computer virus as "a self-replicating computer program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents." The three major types of computer viruses are:
Trojan horses - Viruses that claim to do one thing, but install themselves on your computer, and probably do some damage to your computer when you open them. Have you ever received an email with an attachment that said something like, "Click here to see pictures of the sexiest cheerleaders in the world?" The attachment was probably a Trojan instead of a photo. If the attachment's file name was something like ".vbs," I guarantee you it was a virus.

Worms - It's a virus program that makes copies of itself when you download it. Worms are very common computer viruses and can be hard to detect.

E-mail viruses - They use emails to transport themselves across the vast wasteland of cyberspace. Often, when you download one it will send itself to every person in your address book. A few days ago I was busy doing something and a pop-up window that was supposed to be from Microsoft told me to click it and update a program. I carelessly let it start downloading. By the time I realized it was a virus scam, it had already started sending itself to the people in my Outlook address book.

A very brief history of computer viruses:



1949 - Theories for self-replicating computer programs developed

1981 - Viruses that infected Apple computers released through Texas A & M pirated computer games

1982 - The first computer virus to appear outside the computer lab where it was created, the Elk Cloner, It was written by Rich Skrenta.

1986 - First PC virus, named (c)Brain. It was written by Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi.

1987 - Lehigh virus

1991 - Tequila polymorphic virus

1992 - 1300 viruses are known to exist

1994 - Good Times email hoax

1995 - Word Concept virus is spread through Microsoft Word documents

1996 - Baza, Laroux, and Staog viruses are released

1999 - The Melissa virus is released by David Smith, who later went to prison. It infected one million PCs.

2000 - The Love Bug virus was released. It infected millions of computers, did millions of dollars worth of damages, and shut down websites such as Amazon, Yahoo, and eBay for hours. Another gift package from the Phillipines.

2001 - The Nimda virus, the Anna Kournikova virus, and the Sircam virus appear. The CodeRed virus infects 359,000 hosts in its first twelve hours of life.

2002 - Viruses named for celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez and Brittany Spears make their Web debut. As far as I know, no viruses were named for me, darn it!

2003 - Big year for worms. The Slammer worm infects about 75,000 computers in ten minutes. The infamous Sobig worm, which infected my computer and my sister's computer, rampages the Web.

2004 - Another big year for the creeps who design worms to infect our computers. The MyDoom and Sasser worms play starring roles in the world of the worm. You don't have to open a file attachement for your computer to be infected by the Sasser worm!

Reading this list, you can see that viruses and worms are becoming more sophistcated and harder to avoid. What can you do to prevent them? First, if you don't have an anti-virus program installed on your compter, run don't walk to your computer, and download one from the Web and install it now. It will be the best $50 purchase you ever make! Never open any email attachment that ends in a extension such as ".vb or .vbs." This is a virus, without expection. Always check the description of any attachment before you open it. If it one that is unfamiliar to you, don't open it. If the attachment ends in ".exe", trash it. That means a progam will run if you open it.

If you get an email saying something like "Urgent, download now to update your system," don't fall for it. It is probably a scam. If you get an email saying something like "Free photos of whoever the current showbusiness "hottie" is, trash it.

I hope this post helps you be smarter than me so you will never download a virus or a worm on your computer.

References:



Wikipedia article on computer viruses

InfoPlease article

Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Lifelong Learner Seeking Online Teaching Position

I never planned to use my blog to search for work, but I am getting frustrated. I work full-time as an instructional designer at a community college in Texas, and the job pays pretty well, but I need extra income. Ten years ago my company downsized and I lost the job I had for 30 years. For 20 years I made big sacrifices to save for my retirement, but suddenly I had to start all over and all that money is long gone. For the past 10 years I have worked seven days a week to improve my education and job skills and I have earned two more college degrees and I am more than half- finished with a certificate in distance education from the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

My education at a glance:
- AAS Business Computer Information Systems
- BBA General Business
- MBA - No Specialty
- M.Ed. Education/Instructional Technology
- Certificate in Distance Education - Should complete Spring 2007
- Working toward webmaster certificate

If I can secure an online teaching position, I plan to begin work on a Masters in Psychology next year. If I ever earn that degree, someday I hope to earn my Ph.D. in either cognitive psychology or cognitive science.

For the past eight years I taught computer classes at the college where I work. I have taught classes in web design, business computer information systems, and introductory computer classes. We got into trouble with our accrediation board and now I am only allowed to teach non-transfer computer classes. My school was only letting me teach one class, and this Fall they let that course expire. Now, I am not teaching. It seems that my two masters degrees do not qualify me to teach anything at my community college. The school doesn't need any adjuncts to teach business classes, except in international business, and I am not qualified to teach those classes.

I have been to the websites of several online universities, but only one of them had any part-time jobs I could apply for. I wanted to post this blog in case it could lead to something. You can read my resume at my website, which is at www.austincc.edu/jdclark.
Click the Meet Jimmy link to view my resume.

Sunday, September 10, 2006

Chihuahuas Rule

I have six-month-old Chihuahua puppy named Arwen. She is six months old and weighs about four pounds. If I don't let her get too fat, she will probably never weigh more than about six pounds. Most people think Chihuahuas have always been tiny, but if you know the true history of the breed you know that isn't so.

The breed originated in the British Isles at least as early as around 500 B.C. Paintings on the walls of caves in Southwest England show a breed that looks very much like the modern Chihuahua, except for one thing: the British Chihuahuas were huge dogs, even larger than the various Wolfhound breeds! In ancient British Celtic the word means "Fierce dog that hunts down and kills the wolf." The ancient Celtic peoples used their brave Chihuahuas to track and corner, and then bring down the fierce wolves which at that time were so plentiful and feared in the British Isles.

Merlin, the Celtic wizard who was responsible for the rise of the youth who became King Arthur, had a huge Chihuahua named Cayln he was extremely found of. This noble beast was a great favorite with Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. About 75 years ago a painting was found in an English castle that shows this huge hound lying on the floor next to King Arthur's throne. Judging from the dog's size, he had to have weighed over 150 pounds.

If Chihuahuas once weighed over 100 pounds, why do they weigh only about six pounds today? I'm glad you asked. After Cayln had been a court favorite of Arthur and his knights for about ten years, Arthur's nemesis Mordred showed up in Camelot and began plotting to overthrow the king. You can read about Mordred's rebellion in the many books that chronicle the rise of fall of Arthur and Camelot. The important thing for this report is that Mordred seduced Cayln into joining with him to overthrow Arthur. When Arthur learned of the dog's treachery he locked the dog in a storeroom and planned to put him to death. Merlin talked Arthur into letting him deal with the traitorous beast.

One night Merlin visited Cayln and cast a spell that reduced the dog down to the size of our modern Chihuahua. That is why the breed is now the smallest breed of dog in the world. I'm glad that Chihuahuas now are tiny dogs. I couldn't keep a 150 pound dog in my house.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Wikis - Build Your Own Web Your Way

A wiki is an open, collaborative website, where anyone who has access to it can contribute to it. The first wiki was created by software engineer Ward Cunningham in 1995. He wanted to create "the simplest database that would work", for software developers. He chose the word "wiki" for the name of his database because "wiki" is the Hawaiian for "quick" or "hurry." Think of a wiki as a simple documentation system in which the content may be stored in a database, or as files. An open wiki allows potentially anyone on the World Wide Web to edit it, but some wilkis restrict editing priviliges to a closed group of users. A wiki can be edited online in a Web browser, and it can be edited in plain text.

The largest and best-know wiki is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia used by millions of people every day. Wikipedia says there are currently 1,375,837 articles in the English Wikipedia. The English Wikipedia alone has over 511 million words, more than ten times as many as the next largest English-language encyclopedia, Encyclopædia Britannica. All of the Wikipedias in the world have a combined total of more than 1438 million words in 4.6 million articles in over 200 languages! Over 209,000 authors have contributed to all Wikipedia language versions.

How can thousands of contributors with no central controlling authority produce a coherent, well thought out body of knowledge? For one thing, each contributor takes ownership of his or her submissions, and many people are constantly monitoring the aricles for accuracy and making corrections when needed.

Two good examples of how thousands of people can develop excellent software tools are the Apache web server software and the Linux operating system. The Apache web server may be downloaded free from the Apache Software Foundation. Since its initial design it has been constanty updated and improved by many programmers. It is the most popular server on the Web, and is much more widely used than the proprietary Microsoft servers. Linus Thorvalds wrote the intial core for the Linux operating system in the early 1990s and made it freely available to every programmer who wanted to improve it. Linux use grows every year, and runs on supercomputers, PCs, handheld computers, etc.

If you are interested in setting up a wiki, here are some resources for you:

Wiki Web Collaboration, by Anja Ebersbach, Markus Glaser, and Richard Heigl, Springer, 2006.

MediaWiki.org

TWiki.org

Wetpaint.com

San Diego State University

Sitepoint

Commoncraft

Wikipedia

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Google is Looking for a few (Million) Good Men and Women


A recent article at PC World.Com informs a world hungry for the latest news about the world's favorite search engine that Google has decided to let its millions of loyal users help it organize all the billions of images it has in its index. Question: If there are approximately 9-10 pages of content on the Web, how many images do you think there are on the Web? 20-40-80-100 billion? I have no idea.

Google has come up with a pretty clever idea to entice its millions of daily Googlers to index its images--a game it just launched-- Google Image Labeler. Two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, chosen at random from its index, and given ninety seconds to suggest all the keywords or phrases they can think of to describe it. If any of the two players' desciptions match, they score points.

In 2003 Luis von Ahn and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon University developed a game named ESP to tag its image base. The Google Image Labeler game is partially based on ESP. Would you like to guess how long it will take millions of Googlers to label all those billions, trillions, gadzillions of images?? Once again, I don't have a clue, but I'll bet it won't be finished until long after I am pushing up daisies.

If you'd like to play the game, follow this link.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Freud was Wrong: A Dream is not Always Wish Fullfillment

In Sigmund Freud's book on dreams he says that "the dream is wish fullfillment." He also says something about how a dream can be reverse wish fullfillment, but that made no sense to me when I read his book. Actually, I have read it twice. Last night I had a dream that definitely was not a case of wish fullfillment. I dreamed that I was working for the company I worked for from 1966-1996. My company transferred me to another location. Actually I was going to be working for a small oil company in the town I grew up in. This small company has never been owned by the company I used to work for, but my dreams are full of such inconsistencies.

I dreaded having to go to work for that little oil company. After talking to the people who ran it, I really hated having to go to work there. Why did I have this crazy little dream? None of the people who worked there were my friends and I have no desire to ever seen any of them again, and I have no desire to ever move back to my old hometown. Another strange thing about that dream was that the owners, a man and his wife, magically morphed into another couple who used to live in the small town where I grew up. In my dreams this happens all the time.

I am supposed to move to another campus of the college where I work in a few months, but I am looking forward to that move. Is that why I had this weird dream last night? I wish I knew!!

Monday, September 04, 2006

Google is a Many-Splendored Thing!!

You, like me I am sure, visit Google several times a day, mostly to search the Web, perhaps to check your email. Google is much more than just the most popular search engine on the World Wide Web. In this post I am going to cover just a few of the many features offered by this great Web portal.

Do you know that Google has a second search engine called Google Scholar? If I go to the regular Google search engine and type "cognitive science" in the search box, in a fraction of a second the search engine returns 90,800,000 hits. They are from all over the Web: scholarly journals, college departments, books at Amazon.com on cognitive science, etc. What if I want to limit my search mostly to articles in acamedic journals? I go to Google Scholar and type "cognitive science" in the search box, and get only 1,050,000 hits. I have narrowed my search down to articles that would more useful to a student of cognitive science. This search engine even tells me how many times each of the links has been cited in other works.

But wait--that's not all there is to Google. To see a long list of the many free tools offered by Google, on the menu at the top of the Google home page, click "More," then click "Even More Products." Here you will find all these free tools:

Alerts
Blog Search (I use this one all the time.)
Book Search (I have used this.)
Catalogs
Checkout
Desktop
Directory (Similar to the Yahoo Directory)
Earth
Finance
Froogle (Shopping service- I have used it.)
Images (I use a lot.)
Local
Maps
News (I use)
Scholar (I have used many times.)
Specialized Searches
Code
Co-op
Labs (Features items that are in the beta testing phase)
Blogger (A great tool! It hosts this blog.)
Calendar
Gmail
Groups
Picassa (Free photo storage and sharing tool. I use it.)
SketchUp
Talk
Translate
Maps for mobile
SMS
Toolbar (I could not do without the Google toolbar!)
Video
Web Search
Web Search Features
Pack
Web Accelerator

I have not used most of these tools, but I will post blogs on them as I use them. Is it any wonder I use Google so many times every day???

Links:

Google.com
Google Scholar
More Google Products
Google Labs

Sunday, September 03, 2006

Text Editors for Programmers

If you have done much programming in HTML, XML, JavaScript, C++, Perl, PHP, or any other language, chances are you have used at least one text editor. The ones I have used include Notepad, Simple Text, Text Pad, Edit Plus 2, and the text editors included with the Microsoft.NET, Dreamweaver, and FrontPage programs. One of the first text editors everyone who uses PCs uses is Notepad, the free text editor always included with any Microsoft operating system. The only good thing about Notepad is that it's free. Notepad can't "remember" anything. Every time you save an HTML file you have to select Save As > All Files and add the extension .htm or .html to the file name. Years ago when I was using Apple computers a lot I used Simple Text some. The only thing I can remember about it is that you can record short sound files in it.

I used to use TextPad a lot. It is very inexpensive, under $20, and it has some features Note Pad does not have. For instance, it lets you save files as text files, C/C++ files, HTML files, or Java files. It also has a command on the menu that lets you view your HTML file in a web browser. TextPad is still pretty limited compared to the better text editors such as Edit Plus 2.

For the past few years Edit Plus 2 has been my favorite text editor. It costs about $30. It offers support for the following languages:

HTML
C/C++
Perl
PHP
Java
JSP
VBScript
CSS
XML
C#

Until I started learning Perl, I thought Edit Plus 2 was the last text editor I would ever use, until this morning, that is. I have been learning how to write Perl scripts that display foreign language characters that are supported by the UTF-8 Unicode format. I wrote a short scipt that was supposed to display the Spanish word for morning, and Edit Plus 2 would not display the script. I went to my favorite website finding software, Tucows.com, and searched for a text editor that could handle UTF-8 and found one called EditPad Pro. EditPad Pro supports all these file formats;

Text Documents
HTML
XML
CSS
Delphi (Pascal)
Javascript
Java
J#
C#
Visual Basic
VBScript
ASP
C/C++
Eiffel (never heard of this language)
Perl
PHP
Python
Ruby
SQL
Batch Files
Configuration Files
RSS Feeds
Binary Files

This text editor costs $50, but I am sure that the support it offers for so many file types, plus its many other features, make it well worth the money.

You may want to check out these links;

TextPad

Edit Plus 2

EditPad Pro

Saturday, September 02, 2006

Ten Things That Annoy Me The Most At Walmart

Am I the only person in this country who seems to spend most of their time AND their money shopping at Walmart? I'll bet I'm not alone in this. I can't say that I love shopping at Walmart, because I don't love shopping, period, but I am glad that there is one huge store where I can buy groceries, cat food and litter, clothes, household supplies, music and DVDs, tools, and get my hair cut and get my truck serviced, and buy stamps. While I do love Walmart, to the extent I am capable of loving any store, there are several things that annoy me while I am shopping there. In no particular order, they are:

1. The family that shops together, stays together and clogs the aisles - I am carefully pushing my way down the breakfast cereals aisle. Just as I am nearing the Shredded Wheat and Bran, my way is blocked by a father, mother, four kids, three cousins, one grandparent, and assorted aunts and uncles who are spending the morning debating the relative merits of Cocoa Butterfinger Doodles versus Captain Zappo's Rasberry Creme Compote cereal!

2. Parents, please keep your kids on a leash!! - Unattended children who run through the aisles screaming, throwing balls, jumping up and down, colliding with my shopping cart as I make my way toward the bread rack.

3. Pedestrians versus wheelchairs - I'm going to get into trouble with this one, but I might as well be honest- I am 63-years-old, but considered young in Marble Falls, where so many people retire in the beautiful Hill Country. The aisles in my local Walmart are narrow and cluttered, and it is a bit annoying to have to dodge an eighty-year-old in a wheelchair as I am reaching inside the milk cooler.

4. Not being able to find something I have bought a thousand times in my local Walmart - The reason I spend most of my time and most of my money in Walmart is because I can usually buy everything I need there. This morning the most important thing I needed to buy was a bookcase, the same type I buy once or twice a year in that store. Walmart didn't have any bookcases, and I had to stop at two more stores before I found one, and I had to pay $20 more for the bookcase than Walmart charges for the same thing!

5. Please don't make a call on your cell phone while I am waiting for you to back out of your parking place so I too can park near the front of the store!

6. Cashiers please swipe the CD I just bought so it I won't have to hear "The Walmart inventory control system has been activated, please step back so we can frisk you, you thieving deadbeat!"

7. Having to shop at Walmart the day after Thanksgiving Day.

8. Having to shop at Walmart on Christmas Eve

9. The almost spoiled produce Walmart sometimes puts on sale

10. Someone breaks open a sack of cat food or dog food and I have to try to push my cart though it. This happened to me in a Walmart yesterday.