Never too old to blog

While struggling with format issues  I stumbled upon a blog written by an 82 year old grandma - Helen.  How cool is that?! Her grandson set the blog up so she and her best friend, Margaret, ( for the past 60 years) could stay in touch.

During the election, Helen wrote a few blogs about John McCain’s running mate.  They were an instant hit and now their blog is read by people all over the world and has more than 1 million hits.

This lady is a hoot. She reminds me of my great grandmother – Orabell. I loved listening to her stories as well as her take on the world. She was born in 1898 and lived to be almost 94. She was a strong woman not afraid to speak her mind just like Helen.  However, unlike Helen she could not share her options with the world. Web 2.0 rules.

Grrrrrrr

Formatting this blog is driving me NUTS. I finally figure out how simple it is to create ‘archive’ pages but still can’t get my front page to stop displaying all of my posts! I’m sure it is a simple thing and after I figure it out I’ll be force to paint an ‘L’ on my forehead. Also, I accidentally deleted the time format from my settings page and now all of my posts appear to be written at ‘(Art 517)’.

[sidebar - I'm resiting the urge to end all of the above sentences with at least one '!' out of fear that this blog will be included in PC World's next list of lamest blogs!]

Onward We Go

We have started work on project 3 – a group project. I really loathe group projects. It’s been my experience with academic group projects that work is distributed unevenly. Of course I understand that this is not an unique experience – it is likely human-nature to believe that I DID MORE then anyone else in the group. As a grad student I’ve found myself in some pretty dysfunctional groups, however, this time I believe that I’m finally part of a wonder group.

Our project is to design a ice cream shop’s website. Since this is a ‘web 2.0′ project our site will contain a blog for visitors to discuss how wonderful the shop is, the ability to book parties and order ice cream and toppings. We quickly agreed on page topics and an overall page design. So far, my duties are to design and create the forms necessary to book parties, order ice cream and vote for the next special flavor.

As life tends to be two-steps forward followed by one-step back, so is my course work. Thanksgiving Day after shoveling snow, eating turkey and fixing dad’s computer ‘Dawgs of the ‘hood’ held is premiere familial viewing. In my family, silence speaks volumes. So I’ll take their overall silence as a sign that it didn’t suck big time. During the ‘showing’ I realized that the pug page wasn’t loading properly. The only thing visible was the background brick ‘hood’ image. So after downloading and installing ‘Putty’ I discovered that my attempt to clean up a stray CSS inline font styling was not fully executed. I left behind the opening comment string thus commenting out the whole page! As often heard on ‘Hee Haw’, “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all!”. It’s been fixed but 2 days late.

Web 2.0

Being at the tail end of the boomers, I came of age during the dawn of the silicon era. Young enough to not fear the unknown (computers) but old enough to not grow up with one in my crib, house or even school. My first real exposure to computers was during my freshman year of college. As an accounting student I was introduced to the computer – card punch, reader and all. I was intrigued yet hesitate to delve into the world of programming that included punch cards! Over the summer the system was upgraded to a terminal base system and I signed up for my first programming course – FORTRAN.

My college computer experience put me ahead of the curve once I entered the work force. I learned how to operate many different systems, applications, and operating systems. Except for several additional programming language courses almost all of my computer knowledge has been trial by fire acquired.

So here I am many, many years later learning even more computer skills and feeling like a newbie. I typically use the web as a consumer, except for my job. The whole idea of user generated content is something I had limited experience with – however, i will learn this too!