Fourth Post

Thanks to all those who have visited so far. If you've done more than once, you'll have seen it change from minute to minute. The more I learn, the more gadgets and gizmos I am trying out. Hopefully it will settle into a stable look, and you'll be coming back for the content, rather than the fluff.

My intention was to setup a website with Wordpress, since that is the application I'd heard bandied about. I just happened to pick up a book at the big Borders "Going Out of Business" sale, called "Beginning Google Blogger" by Heather Wright Porto. Who knew Google had blogs! Then again, what don't they do? They don't deliver coffee and a bagel to my front door, but they do most everything else. Well, it didn't take much reading to discover how easy the process would be. I did also pick up an book on HTML, but I also found a google search turned up a great tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/html/ . So hand-in-hand I muddled through the initial setup. Once I really understand the HTML I can customize, but they have so many templates and gadgets, it is almost unnecessary.



I did receive two books from Amazon today. One is "Objective-C for Dummies" by Neal Goldstein, and the other is "Head First Java" by Kathy Sierra and Bert Bates.  I've always done pretty well as queen of the "dummies", so the first was a given, especially if I ever hope to write an iPhone or iPad app. I also liked another book in the Head First series, as they are all billed as "A Brain-Friendly Guide". My brain can use all the friends it can get, and this book has lots of cheerful pictures to drive the point home.

The first programming experience was at George Mason University. In order to satisfy the Biology curriculum, I needed one math course, beyond Calculus. It could be either Biostatistics or Computer Science. I decided to take both. Not only was I a masochist in choosing both, but I opted for Computer Science for Computer Science Majors. I could have taken some fluffier version, but I would have missed the opportunity to write programs in Fortran, submit them to a batch, wait a day for the output (or error notification), and start from scratch. I personally witnessed people ahead of me in the program using IBM punch cards, but fortunately all my experience was at a terminal. That was the last time I did any formal programming. The illustrious professor who never graded or returned a quiz notified us at the final exam that an "A" meant you were in the right field, a "C" was you had chosen the wrong field, and a "B" meant he wasn't sure. As he had scared all the non-computer science majors away the first day of class (except for me), I was satisfied to get a "B".

The only other programming I did was writing some batch files for MS-DOS, on my clunky PC, in the early days of Windows. So now I jump from old Star Trek to Next Generation in one fell swoop. This should be interesting. If you smell something burning, it is probably my brain.