I am enjoying the class work for both courses of the MLIS program, but the connections that have to be made with the university via blackboard and Pitt remote are frustrating. I could not join the chat last night. It gave me the message "Mac OS 8 & 9 are not supported" Well, that's fine because I run OS X so why am I having problems?
I like using Firefox as a browse but that is something new for me as well. I am used to safari. I am not a computer geek. It takes me a while to assimilate.
In the May 19th lecture there was discussion or reference to writing htlm code in the future. The last time I did any sort of programing was as an undergraduate at Shippensburg as a Chem major in the 80s ("how old is she?"). Fortran was a programming class that all majors had to take (Chem majors as a rule no longer take programing classes).
This was before PCs. You entered the program you had written from a terminal, hit the run button and it was fed into the mainframe.
I remember sitting at my terminal (terminals had numbers) along with at least 20 other students who either had entered their programs or were in the process of loading it and slowly but surely all activity would come to a stop and we would all sit and wait...
Finally, a tech would come out of the mainframe room into the terminal room and shout, "Who loaded their program on terminal number so and so? You've a loop. We have to shut down the mainframe. It will be an hour before we can run the other programs" Invariably it was my program with the infinite loop.
So...along with the technical difficulties that I am having with connecting to important software that I need for the courses I now have to face my worst nightmare...programming.
I am calm now, but this morning at 2:30AM I was not.
Oh did I mention that I get up for work at 5AM...
Yes, I am venting...why don't I feel any better...maybe chocolate?
"Finally, a tech would come out of the mainframe room into the terminal room and shout, 'Who loaded their program on terminal number so and so? You've a loop. We have to shut down the mainframe. It will be an hour before we can run the other programs' Invariably it was my program with the infinite loop."
ReplyDeleteThis really really made me laugh. SO FUNNY!
Oh, dear, poor you! But HTML is totally easy--you just have your text that you want people to be able to read, and then you put in tags to tell the computer how you want it to look. Have you ever used a discussion board or something where instead of being able to click a button for, say, italics, you have to put (i) where you want the italics to start, and (/i) where you want them to stop (only with angle brackets instead of parentheses)? That's HTML. And the worst that can happen is your web page doesn't look the way you expected it to.
ReplyDeleteI had to learn HTML for one of my undergrad classes--it was "Using Computers in the Liberal Arts 2" ("1" was how to use Word and Excel and stuff like that). I was fairly alarmed when the class started and I found out that the main assignment was to Make Our Very Own Web Page, but once I got started, it was less scary.
I'm a little scared of the cascading style sheets, because I vaguely remember hearing about them in Using Computers In The Liberal Arts, where the teacher said we didn't have to use them, and I was glad because I didn't really understand what they were. I guess I'll be finding out this term!
Anyway, I think that if you managed your FORTRAN class without running from the room screaming or weeping, HTML should be fine.