This was the week we were supposed to be getting ready to go on vacation to Glacier National Park. Unfortunately, it wasn’t in the cards. After looking at endless fire pictures on the Web and various weather reports, the Moose fire looked like something we didn’t want to experience up close. The fire is up to 64,000 acres now and after dealing with field burning here, smoke of any sort just didn’t seem like much fun. C’est la vie.
In other more nerdy news, James replaced a dying hard disk in his computer. It was a horrible 3-day ordeal and computer parts were everywhere. In the end, after much frustration, he did emerge victorious and now has TWO new hard disks, one of which he is using for a back up. With 60GB of storage, he has lots of room to go wild with files now.
I spent much of this week working on an article for a magazine in New York City and editing articles for the new September/October issue of Computor Companion (which will go online early next week). In the course of all this writing activity, I got the opportunity to play around with Front Page, Net Objects Fusion, Adobe GoLive, and Macromedia Dreamweaver, and other (less good) shareware products that are used to create Web sites.
It was an interesting experience and I made a somewhat surprising discovery. The WYSIWYG tools make things go faster, but it really does help to have an understanding of HTML to get the most out of them. Understanding what’s going on "behind the scenes" makes a big difference. So all those hours I spent learning HTML weren’t wasted after all!