2006 TxBUG Conference

With this post I reach a milestone -- this is my fiftieth post to my blog. I can't wait to reach 100!!

Last week I attended the 2006 Texas Blackboard Users Group Conference, held on the campus of the University of Texas in Austin. I attended several great workshops and picked up some good ideas for my school's upcoming Teaching and Technology Trends Symposium. I think the highlights of the conference were the keynote address about how Blackboard plans to meet the challenges and opportunities of Web 2.0,a workshop explaining the new features of Blackboard 7.1, and one on podcasting.

I left the conference with some new ideas and some new resources, and had the chance to make some new friends from other colleges in Texas.

Back to Blogging - At Last

When I set up this blog I planned to post about 20 blogs per month. For the first couple of months I kept to this schedule, but in the past three months I have not made many posts. There were several reasons for this. First, I have been very busy doing other things that were more pressing. Second, I have had some problems with my health. I have already written about the glaucoma scare. Fortunately, I do not have glaucoma. On Monday of this week I had surgery to repair a coronary artery that was 95% blocked. The surgery went well and I am almost back at full strength. I am not making any promises, but I hope to return to my regular blogging schedule and post from 30-40 times between now and the end of the year. I can't wait to reach 100 postings!

Learning a Computer Programming Language in One Month

During the month of October I took an online programming course in Perl. The reason I took this course, other than the fact that it is part of my Webmaster certificate program, was that Perl and Ruby are supposed to be a lot alike and I want to learn Ruby. That brings me to the reason I have not posted a blog since October, and that is the reason! Of course you can't really learn a programming language in a month, but I did learn a lot of the basics of Perl. When I started writing Perl programs I made lots of syntax errors, but by the time I finished the course I was not making very many. I still make logic errors, but at least my programs will run.

Perl used to be the language of choice for server-side scripting, but in the past few years it has largely been supplanted by newer languages such as PHP, ASP, JSP, CFM, and lately the hottest language on the Web--Ruby and its development environment-Ruby on Rails. I can't wait to study Ruby.