We’re just about done here. I’m going to post now and get things ready to go.

I’ve got a nice long drive ahead of me. Bah. Wednesday, June 25

8:42a

I was told last night that my classroom play-by-plays aren’t so interesting all the time. (Thanks, Jenn.) I won’t deny that. They probably are a little more boring than my standard rant about some stupid asshole who can’t figure out that going 30 to merge on a freeway traveling 60 isn’t going to work.

But look at it this way - you can’t please all of the people all of the time. Right? I mean, it’s not like I’m sitting here getting five days worth of class in three days while sipping piña coladas or some shit. I’m getting the crap beat out of me (from a mental perspective) and working on the “misery loves company” philosophy. Sorry this isn’t as entertaining as all that, but no one’s life is always entertaining. At least, not on paper.

Now, in person, clever-and-funny is my modus operandi. At least, I think so. I can probably find a few people out there who will [reluctantly] agree.

Ate dinner last night at Burgermaster, sort of a farewell between me and the master of burgers, and got a bacon cheeseburger with onion rings. My mouth is still greasy, and I continue to burp oniony goodness even this morning. I’m sure my classmates are going to love that.

I’m working on redoing my blog using CSS (in an effort to lower the quantity of HTML on the site), but I’ve run into some issues getting the three-column format to work entirely in CSS… I’ll have to keep working on this. I’d like to get rid of tables entirely so I can more easily change the look and feel of the site when that time comes. Plus, again, I’m running out of space on the server… I’ve gotta reduce the size of each page.

11:27a

We’re talking now about accessibility - making applications available to disabled users. It’s interesting how much infrastructure there is that I was never even aware of before. Definitely something that I need to take advantage of in my endeavors.

To that end, I should probably download this Zoom+ app (just for demo/development purposes): http://www.gipsysoft.com/zoomplus/

12:06p

We just finished talking about how to add help to your applications. Now it’s time for lunch - back to the little dicey deli they’ve got down the block. I had an iffy roast beef sandwich that actually bled a little, so I’m curious what else they’ve got up their sleeves for me.

1:56p

The deli provided a satisfactory lunch involving a sandwich of various meat-food types and some green lettuce-like substance. I had to remove one of the lettuce formations from the sandwich due to its recalcitrant nature. Those giant hunks of hard… whatever that stuff is… just don’t fly with me.

I barely finished eating before we started class again, so I’m just now getting to the lunch discussion. Not much to say beyond that, though. We’ve gone through application localization and now we’re into deployment. Yeah, that’s boring. I know. You should be in the class.

3:18p

We’re on the last module now - security. It’s starting to look a lot like the security talk I heard in the class I was in last week. I’m hoping this will be a review rather than a load of new concepts. I’m beat, and I’ve got a long drive ahead of me.

During the few breaks we’ve had I’ve worked some more on getting the CSS built up for my blog. It’s actually a lot more complex than I’d originally thought it was going to be, but I can already see the space savings it will provide.

You might wonder why I care about space. Well, right now I’ve only got like 10MB on my web host. With that little space, every bit counts. Since GreyMatter (my blog package) statically renders each entry into its own page, if I can reduce each entry’s size by a little bit, the sum total of savings is much larger. Each page currently is around 15KB in size. I might be able to cut that in half with CSS, which means I can have twice as many entries before I have to move to a new host. Plus the ease of reformatting that CSS provides. I can revamp the whole site with no issues. Win-win, as they say.

If I do end up moving, I’m going to migrate to Movable Type with a database back end. That way I can get pages rendered on the fly and save a hell of a lot more space. I’ll also be able to have a better search/category facility.

But I’m cheap, and I don’t want to pay for hosting right now. So we get what we get. Maybe I can get permission at work to put up a publicly accessible blog server. Hmmm…

4:14p

I think I’m just going to go ahead and post this thing. We’re almost done, and I’m sure nothing else is going to be interesting prior to going home.

All I know is I have a lot of messing around with programming to do before I really have this stuff down.