Mary McNally Mulligan

My grandparents in 1917, the year they were married

All this week I’ve been thinking about my grandmother, Mary McNally Mulligan – or “Gram” as we many grandkids knew her. August 5th was her birthday and I finally looked it up tonight – she was born in 1895. Anyway, she’s been on my mind this week. Maybe it’s all those blackberries. She was a big fan. I remember going out in her yard to pick “thimbleberries” and having them with milk in a little bowl. Here are some photos I had at hand of my Gram:

Mary in 1915

One of my favorite photos of me and Gram. Click the small photo for the full view complete with an un-named cousin in the foreground.

Gram and Tinker, Sept 1969. Her lap always had room for a grandkid or a small dog.

Another view

Yesterday I happened to see a huge sundog – a rainbow between the viewer and the sun caused by light refracting through ice crystals.

Although I couldn’t get a photo of it – it will stick in my brain! There were some great clouds to photograph though – interesting types and combinations.

I thought a lot about the color of sky last night as I started pushing fabric around in the direction of starting a new quilt. To me, the sky is rarely just blue and clouds are rarely just white. But fabric being fabric it will take some maneuvering to approach what my eyes and mind see when I look up.

In other news – some fabulous 40% rye bread just came out of the oven and man – it smells GREAT.

Debra commented:

Let me tell you… beginning my online experience with a text-only orientation has still informed my use of the net.

Anyway… you keep mentioning PHP, but never say what it is.

I do think that many of us who started out earlier in the web world may be more into content than others. I know that readability and content certainly are important factors in what I think about, coming to the web design table. Or it could just be Jacob talking…

My bad for not providing info about PHP. I have read that PHP started out meaning “personal home page” (which I find doubtful) but now it stands for “hypertext preprocessor” or “PHP hypertext preprocessor”. It’s a scripting language used to create dynamic web pages. Now before you flee, it’s not like PHP causes your screen to dance and spin. Rather, it’s a way to pull parts of pages from various places, making it easier to put consistent info and material across a site; perform actions like calculations and information providing and gathering; allow registrations; stuff like that. And it works with regular HTML. I’m only on page 125. For more info there are some great sites and books out there. One of the central sites about PHP says this:

PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

For more definitions:

• Wikipedia
• Google
• a web hoster
• webopedia

That’s all for now!

Are you going to hear more about the learning curve for PHP and all its friends? You betcha!

I started asking this question the other day at work and the responses were interesting so I’ll throw it out here for general response and use:

What is the first web page you remember EVER seeing?

Your first ever. This seems to inspire an automatic part B

What is the impression it made on you?

All to distract you from the learning curve issue. And yet it is related: I am severely reminded of my early days of trying to figure out, without having previously learned any sort of programming language whatsoever, how to write web pages. This was right after the mosaic to netscape switch. Oh my – exciting times they were.

I remember finally calling up the guys at albany.net to ask – but HOW do I get it so other people can see it? Oh – FTP? OK. Get software to FTP? OK. And then it will work? really? And the files are going to go where? And I’ll put what address in my netscape? OK.

But the miracle, and it continues to be no small miracle in my mind**, is that it worked and continues to work.

Fast forward to today and voila – I’m right back to that earlier time when I had to work and work to find out – duh – no closing angle bracket…. or duh – didn’t upload that image now did I? No. etc etc etc.

Today the problem might be curly braces (thanks Dave for that straightforward illumination on convention!) or it might be just the total duh moment of – if you insist on cutting and pasting at least remember to change what needs changing!. Or as in tonight – that “includes/” isn’t part of the scripting stupid, it’s part of the file directory name and you ain’t got that set up! Duh. You can spend a lot of time trying to figure out things like that. Is it productive? I suppose in that it teaches me a lot about troubleshooting code. Could the time be better spent? Oh yes I can think of a few ways, starting with a cool beverage and ending with code that works for a change. But that problem solved and it’s on to the next.

** I’d like to mention here that back then when I so excitedly said – Hey! I’ve got a website! Go here! I was met with roundly vacant stares. That continued for a good two or three years. Ten years later, now people say – what’s the website? like it’s a given and whine if there isn’t one. That’s a miracle too.

OK, just for John, because he laughs about the fact that I blog (and that everyone else blogs too…. but I think he’s just jealous because HE doesn’t have a blog…. yet)

Here’s my work for tonight. My first “real” PHP page. Wildly exciting in some ways and pretty darn boring in oh so many other ways.

added value: for those who just want more, go here for different examples of what I did. I made it up to about page 55 before I crumped out and made a stupid mistake and it was too late to find it. Of course this morning it popped right out at me. the form_handler file has been used and edited quite a few times, so it’s much more complex than when I started. Today I started with arrays. ooooh oooh oooh!