Home

Introduction

Journals 2007

January
February
March
April
May
June

Notes

Literature
Mathematics
Technology
Birding
ModelTrains
Philosophy
Psychology
Science
History

Time

YTDate
January
February
March
April
May
June

Learning:
The Journey of a Lifetime
or
A Cloud Chamber on the Mind

Thursday June 21, 2007 6:10 am Lethbridge

It is +14 C with a high forecast of +29 C. Sunrise 5:23 Sunset 21:43 Hours of daylight: 16:20

A. Morning Musings

6:10 am

This is the second day of summer weather - blue sky, no wind and warm temperatures. I am finally into shorts. I have a coffee mate scheduled for 8 this morning. The rest of the day is in front of me.

I spent a couple of hours yesterday reviewing the photos of our birding trip. Thinking back on the day, I would say that I am getting intellectually lazy. I am putting too much faith in my ability to identify birds from the photos I take and not enough on identifying them in the field. Some birds, the Eastern Kingbird for example, I can identify as soon as I see it. But others, notably the waterfowl and shorebirds, are another story.

From the point of view of this web page, I have four tasks in front of me. I need to set up the links on the left side margin, create a new CSS file for handling the birding trips, and I want to add the planning table to the bottom of this page. I also need to set up a new CSS file for handling all of my notebook entries.

B. Plan

C. Actual Learning Activities

7:05 am

Adding the links to the left side was straight forward, except for the link for the birding trips. This will require some reorganization of my files before I can attend to this. Now to have a look at adding the planning table to the bottom of this page.

This is going to take a little thought. Rather than continue the system of having a table at the bottom of each journal page, I think it makes more sense to have one web page that contains the goals for each month and then to only have the daily goals on a page such as this. Then I can reorganize this page to have the goals near the top where I can set them up first thing in the morning.

10:00 am

The coffee was great, as usual.

Technology activities will be high on my list today. Frank mentioned OpenOffice this morning. I have just checked and it is available for most operating systems including OS X. I am eager to try this open source alternative to Microsoft Office. The first step was to upload the latest version of OS X (10.4.10), also known as Tiger. Done.

Now to download OpenOffice. Nope. There was a problem downloading the software. It stopped after only downloading 4.0 MB. I tried this twice with the same result. I will try again later in the day. One must remain flexible when using the Web.

Back to formatting the table that I inserted in section B (above). This is turning into an adventure. I am not able to display the lines in the table, although I can see the outside border. I think the problem is that the table itself should be recast as a series of <div> elements. Now to see what happens as I explore this.

12:00 noon

The last couple of hours has been another exercise in humility. I am not even close to understanding how to create a table such as I now have in section B using CSS. The table I finally created uses the <table> tag and also uses the Property Inspector in Dreamweaver to create the colored backgrounds and layout appearance for the individual cells. This is simple and intuitive. Doing the same thing using the <div> tag and CSS is difficult (i.e. impossible) and technical. This is a classic case of where having a tutor on the side would likely by much more efficient than reading various books and trying out different ideas.

I am also beginning to have some doubts about how I have created the basic design for this page. It still used the idea of a table as well as the <table> tag to create the overall design. This is fine for XHTML but it does not follow the strict guidelines for XML and CSS. I have noted numerous articles that all say that the <table> tag should not be used and that one should strive for using the <div> tag. I am not there yet.

1:00 PM

After another fruitless 40 minutes I came across a web site that said that the <table> tag should be used when one actually wants to create a table! Thus my table in section B is fine. But I still need to do some work to improve the coding for the layout (which I thought was fine). Definitely one step forward and six steps backward.

5:15 PM

I have just had dinner and am ready to tackle the task of creating a CSS-based notebook insert.

Technology 25 June 21/07

7:00 PM After another frustrating hour I have decided to revert back to using tables to prepare this insert. There may be a way to achieve the same goal using CSS but so far I have not been able to see it. This page is still valid using the W3C validity check service. This is getting messy! Pasting this table into an older webpage gives me a mix of CSS and HTML. This alters the formatting. I am not sure of the best solution at the moment. Time for a break.

8:40 PM

I am still not sure of the best approach for coding this web site.

I decided to continue reading "Dreaming Pachinko" when I realized that the author, Isaac Adamson, had a special way of capturig the phraseology of the modern generation. Let me see if I can capture this.

Literature 32 June 21/07

8:45 Here are a few quotes that I noted while reading the first few chapters of "Dreaming Pachinko" by Isaac Adamson. " 'Life is like pachinko,' Gombei resumed, each word emerging as a separate thought. 'Because life is a game of chance. Which means it's mostly a game of loss. Of diminished returns.' " [p. 6] "I wondered if I should feel guilty about it, then wondered if the wondering was the same thing as feeling guilty." [p. 8] " 'It's a myth,' I said. 'Like free love or trickle-down economics.' " [p. 9] "All of eastern Japan was experiencing a record-melting heat wave ..." [p. 14] "They did each movement in perfect unison, each fish every fish completely synchronized with every other, no stragglers and no showboats. A truly Japanese version of the ideal underwater society." [p. 16] "... it was the kind of stuff marketed to kids who didn't know any better by adults who should've." [p. 19] "... and sucking down enough coffin nails to keep half America's tobacco lobbyists in Armenis." [p. 21] "My brain kept up the good work for a few more seconds, but finally sent up the white flag." [p. 24] "It's a highly specialized workforce running this highly complicated world we live in." [p. 28] "Like in every highly developed capitalist society, the biggest crimes in Tokyo went unpunished because the biggest crimes weren't even called crimes. They were called business-as-usual." [p. 30] "This garden didn't invite contemplation so much as it did a machete." [p. 32] "I sat there wondering what to make of it. Nothing came to mind ..." [p. 34] " 'Do you remember, Mr. Chaka, how it felt to be young?' 'Sure, I guess. Like it feels now, only more so.' " [p. 37] " 'If you brought me here to answer those kinds of questions, you're going to be incredibly disappointed.' " [p. 38] "Getting a conversation rolling with him was like trying to push-start a submarine." [p. 46] "Human interaction reduced to a bare minimum, the kind of place that proves the more people you pack into a city, the more they try to avoid each other." [p. 57] "A politician in Kyoto was warning that Japan must approach moderate reform with extreme caution ..." [p. 58] "... I learned facts so useless they were bound to stick with me forever." [p. 64]