As I looked straight down from a bridge today I noticed that the river is so low that the river bed has become bone dry in places. In other places you see that the gress is turning yellow. When tractors tend to the fields you see that they are stirring up clouds of dust. It is so dry, so often, that it is only a matter of time before forest fires burn down local forests.
It’s easy to use Facebook or other CMS every day without thinking about how the code works. This summer I have coded two CMS using Linkedin Learning. One of these CMS was running with PHP and MySQL and the other was running with Ruby On Rails and MySQL.
In the process I learned how to install MySQL, how to get MySQL and PHP to talk to each other. How to organise files between private and public folders on a web server and more. Getting MySQL to talk with the web server was a challenge that took a few days to get right.
When Instagram was a self-run startup I loved the product. I loved that it was a way of sharing images with friends. I loved that it was fast and that it was light. I also liked that it had it’s own community. I liked that it was a way of sharing real life with people we conversed with online.
When Facebook bought Instagram that slowly changed. Algorithms and popularity contests became more important than sharing between friends and so the sense of community was lost and we were posting for strangers rather than friends.
I usually read several books at a time. This is because I start books but find that my interest is drawn to another topic. As these are usually factual books I can afford to take a break from one book and return to it later.
I started reading this book last night. A meteorologist from, the mid 1850s wanted to study the weather more accurately and in order to do so he wanted to measure the weather from a variety of altitudes. De Saussure’s climbing up the Mont Blanc to measure climate data is interesting.
Objectified is a documentary about industrial design that has been divided into interviews with individuals about a diversity of designs, from the casing of the Mac Book Pro to chairs, a CD player that behaves like a fan and much more.
On Linkedin, this documentary has been cut up and split into chapters so that you can either watch the documentary in its entirety or you can watch it as video on demand with the designers you’re interested in or familiar with. It’s a contemporary implementation of the documentary genre because it assumes that you have five minutes at a time to devote to this documentary.
Linkedin Learning is a video resource for people who would like to learn new skills. These range from writing and painting to sound design, video lighting, project management and more. In following these courses individuals can learn new skills, perfect old ones, and learn new tricks. The point is always to move forward, whether you have five minutes or twenty seven and a half hours.
Taylre Jones Film and Video Colorist - Film from Taylre Jones, Film and Video Colorist by Taylre Jones
Duolingo is a mobile phone app that allows you to learn a number of languages whenever you have a few minutes. In so doing you can learn several minutes at a time, when commuting for example, or you can learn as a focused 20 minute session.
There are two methods of learning by listening. The first option is that you hear a word or phrase and you have to select the correct one from a list. The second version is that you write the correct word with the correct spelling. This can also include listening and writing it in English
I’ve just spent at least two hours playing around with drupal. I was working on bit by bit and actually had a case where I had to RTFM. Over the past few hours, I was trying to understand why I couldn’t place the blocks where I wanted. Finally, I found out. I had forgotten to upload the themes folder therefore no content was uploaded. It’s a Content management system, developed so that people may contribute new content without the hassle of uploading HTML files. I’ve used a few but this is the best implementation so far. So far my impressions are good. I’m running version 5.1 of Drupal, the most recent one. It’s got quite a good number of features and looks really flexible so I may have quite a bit of fun with it. At the moment drupal is not available for direct viewing by people visiting my page but as I get it to behave as I want it to I may bring it forward. As a result, I may finally bring my website into the web 2.0 world. It will be database driven from this point forward rather than static pages as it had been till then. I’m happy with it. Time to continue playing with it.