Tuesday, July 21, 1998

        I'm enjoying learning Javascript, but it's frustrating. As you may or may not have seen last night, I found a little script that inserted a countdown to a specific day. It worked fine in my Netscape browser, so I uploaded the journal entry, but when Mike looked at it in Internet Explorer, it caused an error. So he looked at the code, improved it so that it worked on both Netscape and IE on his computer, and sent it back to me, where it caused error messages in both versions of the browsers that I have on my computer.

        This morning I found another script which seems to work fine on both Netscape and IE, but I have no doubt that it will cause error messages on some browser somewhere. It just doesn't seem possible to design for every possible configuration, although I generally try.

        That's enough of that, I guess. I don't mean to use you guys as guinea pigs, but this is my forum, and I like to try out new things. By that I don't mean, "This is my place and I can do whatever I want, and I don't care what you think," I mean, "This is the place where I have the opportunity to try out new techniques that I'm learning, and the only way to see whether they work in a variety of situations is to try them out here." That's the reason I started this journal, after all, to give myself a reason to learn new things. It wasn't really that I thought that anyone else would be interested in anything that I had to say, but because I needed a motivational tool for myself. It grew into more than that, of course, but the main reason all this started was as a way to force myself to learn HTML and, now, I guess, JavaScript.

        I felt like I was vindicated for not being interested in going on a cruise when we saw the news footage of the fire on the cruise ship last night. I just sort of looked at Bob and raised my eyebrows, saying without words, "See?" And he said, of all things, "They were only about a mile out to sea, they'd barely left port." "Oh, so that makes it okay?" "What if they had been out to sea?" "That's what they have lifeboats for." Uh huh. No thank you. So then he asked me why I was willing to get on airplanes and not ships. Well, aside from the fact that I've had a lifelong problem with seasickness, airplanes aren't a destination in themselves, they are a means of getting to a destination.

        I don't know. I haven't really explored this one deeply. Maybe it's just a prejudice because of the seasickness. I just don't have any desire at all to get on a ship for a week, to eat myself sick and play games with people I don't know. That's probably the main thing--and the thing that Bob and I have the most conflict over--I'm not a social creature. I don't particularly care to meet new people, and I'm not especially good about keeping in contact with the ones I do meet. I'm very bad at that. I'm just mostly a solitary person. I'd probably make a good hermit, as long as I had electricity.

        Cathy wrote this morning in response to my brief mention of the View Master earlier this week. She asked what other toys were my favorites as a child, and said maybe that would be an interesting thing to talk about.

        I started thinking about it, and then couldn't stand it--I went down in the basement to look for the View Master. It was right where I remembered it was, in a cardboard box marked "Save - Willa" in my mother's handwriting. The viewer was there, but no reels. I have no idea what happened to them, but imagine that I sold them for a few cents at a garage sale, just like I sold the crocheted doll clothes that my grandmother made me. I've regretted that for years. A couple of dollars was more meaningful to me at the time. I suppose it never occurred to me that I would ever want those things, but I wish I had them now.

        Other things in the box: A doll, a somewhat unusual doll, I think--not a baby, not a "fashion doll," but a doll that looks maybe six or seven years old, about a foot tall, with a long, gleaming orange ponytail, and dressed in brown slacks and a white blouse. I apparently took pretty good care of her, because she looks brand-new. A wooden apple filled with tiny wooden plates, cups, and a pitcher--a tea set. A metal "Choo Choo Train" made of an engine and three cars with silly looking people and animals painted in the windows. A plastic robot that "walks." Four metal ladybugs with wheels that race off after you run them across the floor a few times. A box of seashells and fossils. Junior high yearbooks . . .

        Oh, damn. I was writing this while I was sitting at the desktop computer in the office waiting for Netscape 4.05 to download. I've been using an older version and had just resisted worrying about it, but I finally decided last night to go ahead and download it to the "big" machine. So while I was doing that, I opened up Internet Explorer, and my home page crashed the browser every time, apparently because of a Javascript change I made last night. So I've been scrambling around, changing the page back the way it was, and now it works in the three browser versions I have on this computer. I will try my best not to have that happen in the future, but if it does, please let me know.