I have been very busy pounding my head against the immovable wall of the World Wide Web, or at least the little part of it that I am attempting to construct. I have also come to hate every version of Internet Explorer for all the things it won't do, and for all the stupid people who are still using it just because it came with their computer.
DUMP IT NOW! Download Firefox or Safari or Opera (they're all free: Safari is good; Firefox is better, and you'll be using them in minutes). Every time I think I have a viable Web page, I take it over to a PC and preview it in Internet Explorer, and there's some kind of code that it won't read, so I have to go in and make a "patch," a special set of codes just for that Microsoft Mutant. If we can stamp out smoking in our lifetime, we can certainly stamp out IE!
I am working far harder at this studying stuff than I would at any job that I can remember having (with the possible exception of my summer at PCPA, the theater conservatory in Santa Maria, where "light weeks" meant only 60 to 80 hours a week instead of 100). Yes, it's still like learning three foreign languages at the same time, only I'm getting much more fluent than I was. I have to remember to keep jumping back and forth between programs and coding languages. If I spend too much time on one language, I forget stuff I learned for the other ones just a few days ago.
Coding, coding, coding! I go to lay out a page and things that should be inside other things aren't. Type styles that I carefully coded only moments before just don't work. There are two alternatives: wipe everything out and start over again, or open up the code for the page and start hacking away until things work. This requires sitting at the computer for hour after hour, making ridiculously large numbers of copies of files so that if everything falls apart, I can go back to a previous version and try to work myself out of the problem in another fashion.
The site is coming along well, though: I originally had well over 100 pages planned out, but soon realized how overwhelming that would be for someone who didn't want to spend the entire day at my site like it were some kind of museum. So I cheated a little bit and purchased a slideshow extension for Dreamweaver: for $30, it works fairly well, though it tends to lock up if I go back and make too many edits on a slideshow. But, wonder of wonders, I am able to go directly into the XML coding (I didn't even have a class on that!!) and make corrections and revisions instead of relying on the editing wizard in the extension.
I've also figured out how to get the header and navigation bars to stay fixed at the top of the page while the rest of the content scrolls underneath it. I'm using this for my writing pages so all the content can go on one page. The upshot of all this is that I have gotten over a hundred pages of content onto a mere 14 pages. And I think there's a nice visual consistency to it.
The main page is a pixelated photograph of me with an introductory statement (I'm still working on the final wording on that. Oddly, the writing part of this seems to be the element that is challenging my right brain the most.) When you roll over the image (which is a Flash animation), the pixelation resolves and you see a slice of the photo beneath with a label showing where it takes you; also, a panel pops up telling you a little bit about that page of the Web site and what to expect there. 
I'm trying to integrate a different kind of structural element on each of the pages to demonstrate I've mastered that aspect of Web design (the Flash on the welcome page, the fixed bar with scrolling text on the writing pages, the multiple-galleries slideshows on the design pages and accordian and fly-out spry widgets on the about, contact and resume pages).
Since I have completed my core lecture courses, I have been going into Burbank to attend the labs. There are about a dozen computers set up in one large room, and there are two small fish tanks at either corner of the room. One of them holds "Killer," who is a very large, very ugly fish who has just about enough room to turn around in the tank and not much else. On Wednesday, I had lab all day, so showed up at 8 a.m. Killer's water was very murky and he wasn't doing much moving around. It was obvious that his filter had been off all night, and he wasn't looking too good; kinda gray. Turns out some good samaritan decided Killer was hungry and brought in some fish flakes ... LOTS of fish flakes, and screwed up the filter (please see blog entry "Life Is Creepy" [Oct. 19, 2009]). Turns out Killer eats pellets, not flakes, and he only needs to be fed twice a week.
One of the other students, a guy probably in his 40s, took a look and said with authority: "He's going to die in about 10 minutes if we don't get him out of there." Sadly (but luckily for Killer) the numerous small fish in the other aquarium had expired the previous week and Joel (the teacher who owns all these fish) had not gotten around to replacing them. So this knowledgeable gentleman drained most of the water out of Killer's tank, got him into a bucket and transferred him into the functioning tank. Within seconds, Killer was his frighteningly bright red self, and was genuinely happy for the assistance.There was a momentous quality to the event for me. I really felt for Killer and realized how much freedom I have, how much my life is moving forward, even though my career's on hold and I'm working at the keyboard until I've got no fingerprints left. But it's movement; it's passage; it's ushering in the future instead of mourning and longing for the past. I've got no idea where I'm heading, but I know mastering my Web site is one of the first steps to wherever that is. I'm assuming it will be great.
And I haven't even started talking about prepping for the certification exam! We'll touch on that next time.
