Month: August 2004

Categories
meta technology

Validation

I really enjoyed Alan’s Best Quote (Today) About HTML. It was worth a laugh but it also got me thinking about the value of code validation. That is a concept that is at the forefront of my mind right now because I just re-designed my website and as I did so I made sure that it would validate as good XHTML. Ironically the only pages that did not pass as valid XHTML were my blogs because of some built-in numerical id tags – apparently id tags cannot be numerical to validate. One thing that I can say from going through that process is that getting your code to validate forces you to really think about what you are doing, how you are doing it and why you choose the things that you do. That is probably more valuable to me than the fact that I have validated code.

As for Microsoft, they don’t care to write good HTML, but where’s the incentive for them? I had to tweak my code after it validated to keep IE from displaying it incorrectly. Why write good code if you are busy supplying a browser that cannot interpret the code correctly?

Categories
culture

Learning for Life

Laura was talking about the need to do better at preparing young women for motherhood. This is not the first time that she has talked about this lack in preparing for life. It has not taken her very long to figure out that her expectations of motherhood were not accurate to the realities of motherhood. She was talking about a great idea which would help young mothers and young women who are not mothers yet.

Laura was proposing that teenage girls be given the opportunity to help young mothers during the early months after their first children have been born so that the new mothers have a little extra help and the young women get a very real perspective on what motherhood is like. They would have fewer incorrect ideas of what to expect.

As we talked about it a little I realized how much things have changed in the way we learn about life from the way they were less than a century ago. Back then children learned what to expect from life when they grew up by participating in the adult activities of their parents. Children might help on the family farm or for those who could not participate in the work that their parents did they might be required to work a job to help support the family. Back then young women learned what motherhood was like by being close to their mothers and by spending a fair deal of time taking care of younger siblings and helping around the house.

In our current society where children are not expected to do anything for their families but instead are supposed to devote their time to learning in the abstract (school) and being cared for as if they were guests at home, it is no wonder that childhood activity is often extended past college with people not knowing what they want out of life. I know that is not always the case but that seems to be the prevailing trend in society.

Categories
life

The Web is Slower Than Life

Society has grown impatient generally because of how fast computers can get things done. I remember when waiting 30 seconds for a program to load on the computer was considered acceptably fast. Now I see people complaining when they do not notice any response from the computer within 10 seconds of them trying to do something on it. I thought that computers had made things generally faster.

I have fully immersed myself into this accelerated culture and I decided that I wanted to make my website more up-to-date by maintaining it as a blog so that I could put new thoughts up as often as they happened. That required that I restructure the site so when I got a break I did so. It took less than a week for me to completely restructure the site. That is when I started looking back at what had happened since I made the decision to change the site. Savannah got run over by a car in the library parking lot (thankfully she didn’t get hurt), Alyssa started walking, Laura got hit by a second car in the same library parking lot (no damage to the cars again) and I flew down to Albuquerque to see my new niece. All of that took place in about a week.

I guess the lesson that I learned as I looked back on all of that is that we like the speed of computers because life is fast. No matter how fast computers get life is faster. The reason that we get impatient as we start becoming accustomed to the instantaneous lifestyle is that we forget that the speed of the computer gives us only the illusion of going at the pace of life and not actually the reality of going as fast as life. We’re still behind even at the speed of life.

If the speed of light is “c” (from e=m*c^2) then the speed of life, “l”, must be close to “c^2” thus e=m*l . . .