I think that I’m starting to get the hang of RSS feeds. My first success was getting a feed up for my first podcast–Music Stuff. Beyond the aspect of seeing if I could do it, the purpose of the podcast is to share my music tastes with family and friends. It’s also to help educate my kids with the music that I’ve had a lifetime to enjoy. To subscribe just paste this URL into iTunes or your podcast aggregator: http://feeds.feedburner.com/daveparnin/MusicStuff
I plan to add a second podcast in the not too distant future that will be aimed more at the general population. Stay tuned.
Dave
The mail form and menu enhancements have been installed. Next on the agenda is interactive content.
Dave
Since the last update I’ve been working with PHP and MySQL quite a bit (and loving it). In the next week or so I’ll be adding an online message form (not fourm) and a little more content within the site.
Dave
Hey there, hi there, ho there!
The revised site is up. So far things are working as expected. There may be some fixed-width pages that should be converted to percentages. I want to add more variety to the header images that change based on the subject of the page.
The good news is that:
- There is a lot more detail regarding my skills and accomplishments.
- The DHTML/CSS/JavaScript menus make it easier to add/modify menu content.
- The new menus should make browsing easier.
- It looks way cooler now.
Next up will be some more Flash, JavaScript, and graphics. Database projects coming as time permits.
Dave
Site updates coming soon! (Really!)
- More Flash
- More JavaScript
- More Detail
Stay tuned…
Dave
Today is a good day. Today is the day that I got Apple OSX running in a virtual machine on my PC. It’s running on Oracle’s Virtualbox software. I’m still working on getting it off the ground with VMware Player.
…and no, I wouldn’t say that I’ve started drinking the Apple “Kool-Aid”. OSX isn’t special, it’s just different, just like Linux, FreeBSD, or dare I say Windows?! This has just been an adventure in learning something new. Hopefully this will help me get better acquainted with the Mac environment so that I can interact better with it when I need to. I still contend that there’s nothing special about Apple hardware other than it’s shiny and nicely packaged.
The world has made Apple a part of the personal computer landscape therefore I shouldn’t stick my head in the sand but that doesn’t mean that I have to play on their beach. …at least not all of the time.
Yee ha!! Today at lunch time I got Ubuntu running in a VM-Ware virtual machine on my netbook. Why does one climb a mountain? …because it’s there. Why install Linux in a partition on a slow netbook? …because I can! Some people ask “why?”. Others ask “why not?”. I say “Who the heck are you? Damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead! Today Linux, tomorrow OS X!!!”.
Did I mention that I’ve got Atari, Apple II, and Nintendo emulators, to name a few, running on my Android phone?! Talk about the convergence of technology…
Dave
For the past few weeks I’ve been immersing myself in VB.NET, ASP.NET, and SQL Server. Fun stuff. By “immerse” I mean where I can work it in in my spare time. Ahh, for the days of my misspent youth when time was plentiful… Actually, I spent my misspent youth in front of a computer too. Both then and now I was enjoying new challenges. The more things change, the more they remain the same. <sigh>
Dave
I learned many years ago not to make New Year’s resolutions. I pick some goals, which could be subject to change as the year goes on and start down that path. As Covey says, “Begin with the end in mind”. It’s time to start the new year and with the new year comes new goals and challenges, both personal and technical in nature. In 2010 the technical challenges were to migrate this and the NPNP sites to a new host, set up a self-hosted blog and forum on those sites, and then integrate them into the site infrastructures. Along the way some web pages were redesigned and others were written from scratch. In the end they were cleaner and more contestant. The 2011 technical challenges will be to get up to speed with web database applications and active server pages both for SQL Server and ASP.NET on Windows and MySQL and PHP Linux. Like last year, my sites will be updated to use the things I have learned. At present I don’t have a Windows based host configured but that’s another challenge.
From a personal standpoint time management will likely be the challenge of the year. To paraphrase Horstman, time management is a myth; what we really do is manage tasks and activities. Time may be a constraint but constraints make goals possible. Over the past few weeks of 2010 I’ve made arrangements to shuffle some tasks to free up some time to work on the studying. Will it be sustainable? Check back in 2012 and I’ll let you know.
All the best to you in 2011.
My 8th grade photography teacher, Mr. Blank, said “Never let them see your mistakes”. He meant that if you took 100 photographs and only two looked good then only let other people see those two. That way they will think that most of your work is that good. It’s a good thing that I never make mistakes but it does seem like good advice. Having said that, I think that my site has most of the polish on and is looking shiny. If it didn’t, I probably wouldn’t say anything anyway.
There will be more changes, additions, and enhancements as time goes by. Suggestions and challenges will be considered. I think that I’ve learned a bit in 2010. As we head into 2011 I’m anticipating gaining more experience with Flash, MySQL, PHP, Javascript, and the .NET framework. I might even work on an Android app, if time permits. If you’re not moving forward then you’re moving backwards. Buckle up, hang on, and get ready for more fun and adventure. Here we go.
Dave