Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go get some autumn shots of the area where I live. This particular one struck me as a very unique shot, since most people focus on the leaves that are still on the tree. The colours have been digitally enhanced a bit, but not much. This is pretty much how it looked at the time, an entire field of red fallen leaves.

Woot! Today was the first day of my second class, “Practical Javascript”.

Since the last time I posted, I’ve gotten to “talk shop” with my instructor quite a few times, and while he doesn’t really know PHP, he’s very interested in learning it, so I gave him the source code for my entire site. Unfortunately, I recently discovered he’s a hardcore bible-thumper, so I hesitate to talk about anything other than web design/scripting topics. But, he’s a nice guy, and really knows his stuff about HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

The last class ended on a pretty good note. I had a really bad cold on day 3, and I was so doped up on meds I barely knew what was going on. Thankfully, I already knew everything that was covered that day (as far as I can remember, anyway), it was all CSS stuff. Day 4 was introductory javascript, and for the first time, it actually started to make sense.

This second class is much nicer than the first. There are only 3 people in the class, and all three of us work with web stuff on a regular basis, in some form. There’s the old guy from the last class, who apparently does a lot of web design/maintenance, but somehow doesn’t really know what he’s doing. He catches on quickly, though, and he’s pretty cool. The third person didn’t take the last class, and based on her questions and such today, she probably should have. She’s has a small business as a web designer for individuals and small organizations, and while she’s a bit behind on standards and such, she’s a fast learner as well. We actually finished class over a half-hour early today, and that was with the instructor trying to stretch things out. I hope we’ll cover extra material next week

After class, I asked the instructor to help me figure out the CSS issue I was having with my new email form, so he took a look, as well as the woman in the class. It turned out to be quite the ego-stroke for me, because she was utterly blown away at how nice my site looked. Our instructor agreed, and said that my site looked better than anything he’d ever designed, with far more dynamic functionality. And he’s designed sites for several fairly large companies, which looked pretty damn nice in my opinion. I spent the next 10 minutes or so showing them all the scripts I’ve written, and how the site is actually assembled (neither of them have any real experience with PHP, although the instructor works with Apache SSIs on a regular basis at work). It was fun

I’m really looking forward to next week, this is so much fun! It’s like, the more I learn, the more I want to learn, and it’s been YEARS since I’ve truly enjoyed any sort of class. I don’t plan on blanketing my site with javascripts, if anyone’s worried about that, I rather like the efficiency of PHP (the new email form I made, for example, only uses Javascript to launch its popup window when not on the Contact page), but there are some things that just can’t be done server-side.

EDIT: Since the original poll was LJ-based, I can’t really replicate it here. This was a quiz with four true statements and one false statement about me, with instructions for people to guess which one is false.

Sorry for the delays in posting this, it’s been a busy weekend. Here is the correct answer to the quiz I posted, and an explanation of each item:
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Well, today was Fox’s final move-out day. He’s now in Pittsburgh, and I’m here by myself now. This house seems a lot emptier, but, well, I’ll adapt.

I took the opportunity to do some re-arranging tonight, which I just finished the majority of. My desk has been relocated, I replaced a crappy old bookshelf with a crappy new one, and I replaced a LOT of lights. I put daylight-spectrum bulbs in the tracklighting in my hallway, put them on a dimmer switch, and replaced Fox’s lamps with some very nice dimmable fluorescent torch lamps, creating an almost perfect light level at full-dim, and rendering the horrendous overhead fixtures unnecessary at full brightness. I also replaced a few other bulbs and fixtures, so aside from the track lighting (which is on a dimmer switch to conserve power and extend bulb life), there are no non-fluorescent lights down here. Yay energy efficiency!

In other news, WPAFW rocked, I came home with a cold, and was very spaced-out in class last week. It was a cool class though, we did CSS. I don’t remember if I picked up any new info, though, I was pretty stoned on clinical doses of Sudafed and Tylenol. I was able to breathe, though! This week, we cover basic javascript, which is the reason I took this class in the first place.

http://www.lupinia.net/photo/pgh-night.php

This was an impromptu shot from the roof of fox_cub’s new house in the Troy Hill neighbourhood of Pittsburgh. I happened to look out a south-facing window, and saw this view of the downtown triangle that begged to be photographed. I started exploring his house in search of a clearer, less restricted view, and ended up finding the vantage point I had in mind on the roof of his 3-story house. Probably the most work I’ve ever done for a picture, and scariest spot I’ve taken one from, but it was worth it!

Unfortunately, the humidity haze makes the display-sized versions of these seem a bit washed-out, so I recommend viewing the full-size version to get the proper appearance.

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Yay, I had class again last night! The evening didn’t start out as good as last time, though, I was almost late for class, and the professor wasn’t quite as cheery. We also started getting into more complex material, namely tables, images, and forms. Still stuff I already know how to do, but I did learn something genuinely useful, which was how to make the alt text of an image appear as a hover-tip in Firefox like it shows up in IE (if you don’t already know, you do it by using the title= attribute in addition to the alt= attribute on img tags, because Firefox doesn’t like alt attributes for some reason).

Redneck Boy appeared to have been studying this past week, because he seemed to be catching on very quickly. His mom, on the other hand, still couldn’t figure out how to save a file in Notepad [rolls eyes]. Everyone else was doing pretty well, too, I wasn’t the only one answering questions this time

Coding forms was a painfully boring experience. For those who aren’t familiar with HTML, the forms I’m referring to are the ones that you fill out for things like online stores, LJ comments, forum logins, and so forth. And coding them by hand is practically mind-numbing, because there are a LOT of attributes to set. I have Dreamweaver, which I use for all my work regardless of what I’m doing, so I plan to never again hand-code a form. Ugh.

Anyway, this prompted me to do some work on my own site, so all of my images now have hover-text in IE and Firefox, and I rewrote the Flash code on my site, including making my first actual function in PHP. It’s browser-sensitive, and outputs standardized code regardless of what you’re using. Thus, the embed-tag issue mentioned in one of my previous posts is no longer applicable.