Moving Forward

Well, I have been making some great progress this week. I discovered a website that is chocked full of tutorials that will help me to fill in the gaps in the knowledge that I have. These gaps it turns out were big enough to drive a C-5 through! However, I am glad that I am learning this material and even more glad to have discovered this web resource.

Right now I am working my way through the html tutorials. So far, I have learned how to do the things that Blogger has automated, but I have also learned how to tell you that the temperature is a brisk 36° and I can tell you that 3² = 9.

I have learned some other fun tricks too. For instance, I have learned how to justify a paragraph. I will endeavor to type long enough for this to be evident by the way that this paragraph displays. I sure hope this is long enough.

I Can Also Now Do Headers

And I have also learned how to use anchors to do lots of fun things. For instance, I can give you the link to the website I have been using to learn this stuff by clicking HERE. Yes, I am sure that you are all thoroughly bored impressed. Well it is a very good site where I can learn html, xhtml, xml, css, javascript, sql and lots of other useful stuff.

It is astonishing how many people publish stuff to the internet without any editing whatsoever. I am amazed at some of the things that I have read that were written by obviously intelligent people who didn't know the difference between there, their, and they're. I used to be a big advocate of supporting the validity of usage in language, but if things continue at the pace they are going now, in 50 years what passes for written English will be unintelligible to people born before 1980. It is darn close now. I consider it a failing of the modern educational system. In trying to keep from hurting Johnny or Betty's feelings by forcing them to learn how to write, we simply let them go with the flow. This dumbing down has to stop.

I just read Dickens' A Christmas Carol for the first time and I dare say that there are very few 12th graders who would have been able to understand it - yet in Dickens' day his writings were very widely read even by children. How far we have fallen! Granted, I would have liked to have a copy of Cliff's Notes to have understood the references to cultural things that I didn't understand.

It has been an interesting week. My 88-year-old Grandfather has had a very rough time of it. He fell repeatedly last week and managed to crack his skull. On top of that he had a heart attack. On top of that he lost a lot of blood from bruising from his falls. On top of that he has dementia. When I saw him on Saturday he looked like he had been in a bar fight. He has been in the hospital since Friday. He is one tough customer. Still kicking. I doubt that I'd still be hanging on if I'd been through all that. But he has always been tough. When he was 13 his appendix ruptured and he survived that somehow. (When he was 13 it was 1932. No antibiotics - especially for a sharecropper's son in po-dunk Salisbury, NC.) I was in the midst of a Church Christmas party when I got the news.

So that is what is going on in my world at the moment. Most everything is revolving around getting the education (Thank God it is free!) that I need to build the website. Now to persevere on... Your prayers are appreciated.