2005-11-12

Posture!

So, it's 4:30 in the morning and I'm wide awake listening to Radio Paradise. Great music. Dreadful hour. My back hurts. My brain is fried. All is not lost for I have chocolate.

Ya know, I've never really liked keyboard shelves under the desk. But I'm beginning to think that the cause of my back pain has been from leaning to type. This started about the time I replaced my desk. (And nearly killed myself crawling around on the floor running wires behind the desk.) Bad posture may be aggravating things since I spend like 16 hours a day typing. So, yesterday I installed the keyboard shelf that came with my desk. I think it has made a big difference. Still some aching but nothing like it has been. And it seems to be slowly improving. I guess I'll know after a few days.

Visitors

In other news, I was visited briefly by a very pregnant Mantis:


Shapeshifting Forms

I keep running into major annoyances when writing complex web forms. The appearance is always ugly and varies wildly based on browser and operating system. It's a real problem in situations where you need the form to look precisely one way no matter how it is viewed. So, I've been contemplating writing a comprehensive javascript class which allows you to customize a form so it looks consistent across all operating systems and browsers.

Most importantly, this wouldn't require any changes to the way you create a form. You could take an existing form and simply attach the class initializer to the window.onload event. The form is created using perfectly normal HTML. The class rewrites the appearance of the form using javascript to manipulate CSS and HTML. There are numerous disconnected examples of this already. I modified an existing example of a form select for my proof of concept HTML form themes. It's really pretty ugly at the moment. But it's given me some confidence that a class library is feasible.

Less importantly, HTML forms look horrible on paper. So I'd also like to have a print function which takes the editable form from the web page, reformats it and makes a nice printed document. This is something that comes up more often than you'd think. Often people will print a form just before they submit it so they have their own record.

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- posted by Augur @ 02:26 [Permanent link]
2005-10-04

What you won't learn in highschool...

Well, it's been just over 10 years since I graduated from highschool... What have I learned in those 10 years? Well, I'm sure more than I even realize. And I've forgotten at least as much as I've learned.

In highschool they badger you about grades, attendence, your appearance, your attitude, and so on. All are important things, of course. Sometimes they get sidetracked trying to convince you of other crazy stuff that doesn't matter. But they often forget to talk to you about why you are there in the first place.

Why do you go to highschool? Well, I've always believed that you go to highschool to learn how to survive after highschool. All schooling before highschool is truly irrelevant to life. It's a good knowlege base upon which to build and it's certainly important. But it won't help you survive in the real world. Survival in the real world seems to be the one thing the schools, as a whole, fail to teach. In highschool I'd often see teachers reprimanded for offering, what I realize now was good, advice to students. Often a student will get lucky and one or two teachers manage to do the job that the whole school system failed to do up to that point.

Things they probably won't bother to tell you in highschool:
  • Your algebra teacher who's also the basketball coach doesn't even know algebra.
  • Your highschool grades don't matter after highschool.
  • Take as many industrial arts and hands-on classes as possible. The practical knowlege you gain from these classes will make you truly stand out in ways you can't even comprehend until you're older.
  • Take a class where you have to fix problems. I took a 4-year electronics course in highschool. The most important thing I learned in those 4 years was how to divide and conquer complex problems and make them into a collection of simple problems. Once it becomes second nature it offers truly remarkable insights other people can't have. You can solve any problem 100 times faster than the average person.
  • Take business classes if they are available.
  • If you don't graduate you'll never get a real job. That diploma means you won't starve to death in 10 years.
  • Even if you do graduate you're never going to make more than about $25,000/yr (unless maybe you're some weird freakazoid genius). You might edge your way up to $30,000 by 40. (Bearing in mind, with inflation that means you'll probably still be starving.)
  • Go to college. Any college. Take some math, science, and business courses. You have to. Immediately after highschool. Don't wait. Don't assume you can work really hard and save money up for school later. You won't. Apply for all the financial aid you can right after highschool. Even if you don't get a degree it will erase the 4 years in highschool you wasted not learning algebra and such. You'll easily make $35,000/yr in a couple years. You may yet starve but you've probably postponed it a while.
  • Don't get suckered into some non-accredited "technical school" that promises you a good job. Go to a real college of some sort. Technical schools arenothing more than a recruiting center for employers. Those schools exist for the benefit of employers rather than the students. Sure, they'll show you figures like "90% job placement" but what they fail to tell you is that 90% of those job placements lose their job after their probationary employment period expires. If you go to a real collegereal jobs will be available when you're ready.
  • Learn to write computer software and fully utilize basic technology. Don't just learn to use some program. Learn to make your own programs. Especially, if you aren't studying technology. A business major who understands technology is worth a fortune, for example.
  • Take some basic computer science courses in college. Learn how computers and technology works.
  • Always believe you can do anything if you put your full effort into it. If you start thinking you can't do something then you've already failed.
  • Be the best at exactly one thing. Pick something profitable and learn everything about it.
  • Be great at many things. Strive to be a Renaissance man (or renaissance person for the politically correct whiners)
  • Don't memorize information. Your memory will fail you. Instead memorize how to find information. You'll find that sometimes you remember things anyway. But you should always verify your memory. Having an instinct where to find the correct answer will keep you from wasting away years of your life asking other people questions with obvious answers.
  • Lastly, and this is the most important thing you'll ever do... Write down in a notebook (or preferably a computerized equivalent) every single thing you learn or do or problem you solve. Write it down in a way that you'll never lose in your entire lifetime. I use a simple text file on my computer. For the last 10 years I've religiously kept notes on everything I know in a single text file. And I can't stress just how vital this has been. A simple notebook will allow you to remember everything forever. And that's truly empowering.
Now, go find other people with advice about what to do during and after highschool. I may be wrong. I may be nuts. Who knows. But in the end you'll be better off if you start thinking about it sooner rather than later.

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- posted by Augur @ 23:49 [Permanent link]
2004-07-30

TV...

Many people have commented lately that TV, particularly news, is slowly becoming irrelevant. Could it be that (many younger but some older) people are slowy starting to find out that reality is much more interesting? (That might explain the proliferation of lousy reality-like TV programs.)

Why listen to a 15 second news report when you can read (or hear, or watch) accounts of the event from people who were actually there? That's a wholly different situation from the one where you have reporters planted in fixed positions being fed a doctored version of the news. Obviously there are times when it is completely appropriate to "doctor" up news a bit (omitting names, not revealing private details, etc). But those are issues where society and peer pressure already apply to some extent. And I think society will work out the other details over time. Sure you will get some personal bias and whatnot. But newspapers and others media outlets are becoming increasingly biased for whatever reasons. And if it was a big event you can just ask someone else what they thought. If it was a small event then you'd probably never had heard about it otherwise.

So, what am I rambling about? Well, I guess blogging... This thing I'm doing right now. It is becoming easier every day to add audio, sound, and soon I bet we'll have video. Many blogs put other so-called news sources to shame. Many blogs are focused on a very narrow subject but most seem to talk about whatever is on the mind of the author at the moment.

And the beauty of the whole blogging concept is that you can use a feed reader client to pull blog entries from all over the web into your own personal newspaper.

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- posted by Augur @ 17:18 [Permanent link]
2004-07-13

Blogger...

OK, everyone has been trying to get me to use blogger. So here it goes. Yay?

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- posted by Augur @ 00:35 [Permanent link]