Friday, February 20, 2009
Breakfast: lowfat yogurt, fat free cottage cheese, fruit bar. Went to a Javascript class at Academy X (601 Montgomery Street). I got the time of the class wrong and arrived an hour early, had trouble finding a payphone nearby. (Closest one was the Montgomery BART station.) I've been working the web a long time and have poked around with Javascript but never took a class. Rob H taught the class. He was a pretty good instructor, and I gave him a good evaluation at the end of the class. We didn't really cover that much material, but I did learn things and he answered all questions well. Academy X doesn't seem to have an advanced Javascript class, but they do offer an ajax class. I think there are some classes in between that are missing, though. For example, we didn't cover any animation today—that could be a whole day. Another class could talk about Javascript libraries and how to use them. Another class could identify cool and useful Javascript things and deconstruct them, show you how to use them on your own for your own stuff. Another class could cover unobtrusive Javascript, which was only mentioned briefly in today's class. I learned what camel case was. I successfully completed all the labs (except #4, which I think we somehow skipped) including all the extra credit and the extra extra credit, but he never came around to check our work! Rob H recommended Regular Expressions in 10 Minutes by Ben Forta and Javascript: The Missing Manual and Javascript: Your Visual Blueprint. I learned that innerHTML is used to modify the contents of an element. More notes: tacosw.com, regexlib.com, krook.org/jsdom, Tamper Data plug-in, PRACTICE. Don't use "#" in an href element—instead use "javascript:;" or "javascript:void(0);" or (I think) "return false;". Lunched with Eric D outside the Transamerica Building. After the class, Patrick and I had burritos at Gordo on 9th between Irving and Lincoln, then we went to Friday Night at the de Young Museum. Recently I've been wanting to do things on Friday night instead of staying home. I can't tell yet if I'm really always tired at the end of the work week or if it's simply all in my head. Free drink tickets for members today! Woo! We walked the Andy Warhol exhibit, and although there's no denying his popularity, influence, and production, we were both rather unimpressed with the whole. From the exhibit, he seemed to me to be a man with a small number of good ideas that were repeated over and over and over and over and over again, often on the same canvas. Patrick and I were not familiar with some of his illustrations, and these were more interesting to us than his popular silkscreens and paintings of celebrities. I had never seen the record album with the zipper on it—that was neat. DJ Juanita More glammed the turntables with hip and groovy classics and non-classics from the 1960s. The art table encouraged visitors to recreate Warhol's multicolor portraits outlined in pen. We were exhausted afterwards. To bed earlyish (8:00 PM).