What did I learn this past week?

• Dyslexic people get all kinds of perks (sort of). I finally did my research on dyslexia. I’ve had a hunch that dyslexia was the reason behind many of my querks and school issues but I found out that so much more of my life has been influenced by this disability. I have never been tested but after doing the research I could have been the dyslexia poster child growing up. Why the sudden interest? I want to go to grad school but in order to do that I need to a) get a decent score on the GRE and b) my GPA isn’t that great. Once I am officially declaired dyslexic it turns out that I will have more time to take the GRE. It would also explain to whatever school I apply to the reasoning behind my GPA being not so great. For more info on dyslexia go to http://www.interdys.org/ I also learned that my mom is mildly dyslexic as well (I confronted her on the issue of my not being tested at an earlier age).
• The internet knows everything. How do you get deoderant stains out of clothing? How do you reshape a slightly shrunken wool sweater?
• Power steering fluid is important. Without it my car makes a high pitched screeching noise when you turn the wheel.
• Replacing the brake lights on my car is a lot easier than replacing the headlights.

Does my current project have explicit learning goals?

• Networking 101: Ongoing
• Website: Working on expansion to include the women’s group. Possibly designing a pages for a few friends.

Stay tuned

What did I learn in the past week?

• Trial software is free for a reason: 1) the company is using it to get feedback to build a better product and/or 2) the company gets you hooked so you are forced to buy the full version for all of the add-ins.
• Sometimes mistakes end up creating a better product. In the process of working on part of my Halloween Costume I ended up cutting a small hole in the fabric. I had two options fix the hole or come up with a new plan. Then I ended up making the decision to create a new costume and cut out the piece of fabric entirely.
• Networking is a valuable skill.
• Human Resources is not a useful department in most companies. If you care about your employees shouldn’t you give them a functional HR deparment?

Does my current project have explicit learning goals?

• Mike’s Thesis is in limbo, I need to see if someone at work has ArcPublisher.
• The self-help group experiment is moving along. My goal is to increase my communication/networking skills.

I promise to provide some insight on my latest home renovations, but in the meantime I will tell you about my latest website renovation.

I have always wondered why people are hooked on blogs. I am not against them. Just curious. Then I built my website and realized that a blog would be the best way to chronicle my ongoing projects. People can check up on what I am doing, comment on what you see or make some requests on what you would like to see.

In my quest for organization I did some research on the web. Some of my friends are bloggers. Some of my daily web amusements are blogs. Here are some of the sites I visit and some comments on the blog platform.

In the end I chose blogger. I needed something free and easy to incorporate into my own web site. All I did was modify my existing cascading style sheet to include the codes that blogger uses. Easy? Well, I had to tinker with it. I am often responsible for building websites at work but they never get to be this complex. No Javascript, no colors, no images, no css… Superbland. I still have a few features that I want to add to the navigation bar (recent posts).

Stay tuned.