My trial was today (read about my arraignment in February) at 5:00 PM. At least this time I didn’t miss but a quarter day of work. I arrived at traffic court a few minutes early and found which courtroom I was supposed to be in. People were scattered but there were people in every pew. I picked one that had an older guy at the end and stepped around him. The guy in the pew in front had his tattooed arm up on the back of his pew and it was kind of in my way so I said “excuse me” and nudged his arm out of the way. He seemed to take offense and said something to me, but you have to stand your ground early here or nobody will respect you.
Animation
For the website I did for the Sidney Lanier Bridge, I created two animated .gif images, one for a construction sequence, and the other for the tower crane (at the bottom of the page). These were pretty simple but I learned some of the basics of animated .gif images when I made them. An animated .gif is a series of .gif images compiled to run one after the other. To get smooth motion you can make each frame last a certain length of time in hundreths of seconds, but it gets cumbersome making so many frames. If you want, you can make each frame last different numbers of seconds. You can also have the animation loop a set number of times or forever. It’s interesting, but I don’t have much of a reason to do animated .gifs very often.
AOL Guardian
While fixing a co-worker’s home computer, a dilemma that presented itself was whether to use parental controls that AOL offers. At first I used the “Young Teen” setting for her younger son and “Mature Teen” for her son in 11th grade. Both settings are supposed to restrict access to some websites. What I found out was that all or nearly all sites were being blocked, even for the Mature Teen. As a compromise, I gave him full web access but enabled AOL Guardian which logs the sites he visits and sends a report to his mother. Though the whole family uses the computer, it is located in his room and he is often home by himself. Parental controls at AOL also allow her to restrict the amount of time per day (one hour is the lowest; I remember when AOL restricted you to 10 hours per month) as well as the time of day he is allowed to log on. I didn’t activate those.
Fixing a computer
Back in August I wrote about working on a co-worker’s home computer that was attacked by viruses and Trojans. At the time I wasn’t able to really fix it, just make things a little better. After a few months the computer became so busy running all of its viruses and processes that it ceased functioning and you couldn’t even start any programs. I knew this time that rather than try and fix the computer it was time to reformat the hard drive and start over with a fresh installation.
100 Things to Do
This is another thing that Don sent me. I have been to 10 of these places (I list them at the end; 3 in the top 10) and have seen two more in person but not been inside (Versailles, the Kremlin). Sadly I never went to The Temple of the Emerald Buddah while I was in Thailand and when I was in Beijing I decided to sleep in instead of going with my friends to The Forbidden City that day.
Here are the Top 100 “wonders”, but Don called this his Ultimate To Do list. He has been to 15 of these.
1 Pyramids of Egypt
2 Great Wall of China
3 Taj Mahal – India
4 Serengeti Migration – Kenya/Tanzania
5 Galapagos Islands – Ecuador
6 Grand Canyon – USA
7 Machu Picchu – Peru
8 Iguazu Falls – Argentina & Brazil
9 Bali – Indonesia
10 Amazon Rain Forest – Brazil & Peru