Week 2: To Err in Latin is Divine...

I am currently unemployed.  Have been since the middle of August when I quit the restaurant that I had been working at for two years in order to pursue employment with the Canadian Coast Guard.  The only real experience aboard ships I have (aside from the training I received last month in for my Marine Emergency Duties) is from a week-long stint on a fishing boat 5 years back when I was hitchhiking Northern British Columbia.  But I have always had a love affair with the water and I like to help people. I think it may also have something to do with the tales of my grandfather working for Pacific Towing as a tug boat engineer, or maybe my father always talking about buying a sailboat when he wins the lottery.  But regardless, the thought of being out in the middle of the ocean on a ship buffeted by stormy weather gets me a little excited.

So what does all this have to do with the title of today's post?  Well, long story short.  I have completed the courses I needed to apply for the Coast Guard and I have submitted my resume. I was initially offered a 2 month position, starting the next day, which I had to turn down as I wouldn't have been able to get all my affairs in order in that time (and I had personal obligations that I couldn't duck out on).  Since then I have waited by my phone for a call with another offer of employment.  It has been a month.  No calls.  It is unfortunately the slow time of year for the Coast Guard in regards for hiring(I kinda lucked out being in the right place, at the right time, when I handed in my resume).  So my intent is to get a casual position with Vancouver Island Health Agency as a receptionist, but in order to do that I need my medical terminology certificate.  It is a 3 month course.  I intend to challenge the course.  To get my certification I must score above 72% on a 50 question multiple choice exam.  The full course costs 400 dollars.  To just write the exam?  25 dollars.  I figure it is worth my time, energy and rapidly dwindling back account to teach myself all I need to know.  That and it dovetails quite nicely into an entry for this blog.  

So.  I need to learn medical terminology.  I need to know my osteos from my laryngeals, my itis' from my opathy, my infarcts from my ..... something else.  See?  There is definitely stuff to learn here. 

So to start.  What have I learned thus far?

Well, to understand medical terminology I need to understand the roots of the words being used.  This gets me a wee bit excited, as something that I have always wanted to study is etymology.  And that is basicly what I have to do there.  

Some organ basics:  

• Osteo = bones
• Myo   = skin
• Neur  = nerves
• Card  = heart
• Derm = skin
• Vas or Vasc = veins & arteries
• Ven or Phleb = veins
• Arteri = arteries
• Angi  = blood vessels
• Hem(o) or Sang = Blood
• Encheph = brain
• Tympan or Myringo = eardrum
• Rhino = nose
• Oto = ear
• Ophthalm = Eye
• Crani = Skull
• Odont or Dento = tooth
• Lingu = tongue
• Esopha = Esophagus
• Hepato = Liver
• Chelocyst = gall bladder
• Gastro = stomach
• Colo = large intestine
• Ileo   = small intestine
• Thorac = chest
• Pneumo or Pleuro = lungs
• Mamm = breast
• Thromb = blood clot
• Neph   = kidney
• Scapul = sholder
• Brachi(o)= arm
• Carp(o) = wrist
• Costo = ribs
• Dorsa = back
• Pod or Ped = Foot

So that is just a few of the roots.  Oh, who am I kidding, that was all of the roots that I learned today.  {grin} Unfortunately, this is it for the evening.  Sorry it isn't all prettied up.  I'm tired.  It's late.  I'm going to bed.  But I have full intention of coming back here tomorrow and sprucing it up.  Full intention.  But you know what they say about intention?  Yeah.  Me neither.

Tomorrow: Basic Medical Terminology prefixes and suffixes.  I can't wait.  Oh, and I will post the second part of my HTML experiences.  Hope you are all having a great day!

Day 3 - 5: HTML Basics.... basically (Part 1 of 2)

 Hello Everyone;

Sorry there has been a three day lag between posts.  I am still trying to figure out what the best format for this blog will be.  I like the idea of a daily "I learned this..." but thus far I seem to have taken on a few things that are taking more then a day to put up.  What are your thoughts?  Would you rather I post something new everyday even if it doesn't fit with the theme of the week?  Would you like daily updates as to my progress? I am keen to hear everyones opinion.  I may not use it, but I do value it.
Now then, when I scoured the net to give me insight into the intricacies of using HTML I found this wonderful site! Not only does it offer a free step-by-step course, it breaks into two sections: Basic and Advanced. When I first started on this I figured I would cover the basic section in my post last Monday, but well, there are a lot of basics to cover and I wanted to be fully conversant in those basics to present them to you.  Here it is for your viewing pleasure.

First off, for those of you that aren't aware, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) is THE markup language for webpages.  I didn't know this myself.  And you may be asking the same question I did after reading that, "What hell is a markup language?"  In short, a markup language is the behind the scenes directions that present the information you are seeing in front of you on any webpage.  These pictures of books on the side of this blog?  Described in the markup language.  The reason the title of this blog is bigger and bolder than the rest?  Markup language!  The colour, font and size of the lettering? ...  You get the point.  What is interesting about this is all you need do is right-click on any web page and click "view page source" in the case of a Firefox web bowser or "view source" in the case of Internet Explorer to see what HTML code looks like.  Feel free to give it a try right now!

Now then, if you have taken a second and checked out the source code behind the page you may have noticed a bunch of things; there are a lot of things that are enclosed by angle brackets (<, >), within those brackets there are terms that are different colours, and if you looked closely you may have noticed that different words are "paired"(If there is a <style> somewhere, futher on there will be a </style>).

First the angle brackets:  HTML is comprised of commands called "tags" and those "tags" must be placed with the angle brackets for the webpage to read them and carry them out.  They are like quotation marks around a sentence; they let the webpage no that it is time to sit up and take notice.

Next the colour coding:  The individual colour coding is unique to each browser.  In the case of Firefox it looks like this:

And lastly the colours; purple, blue, green, red and black.  The purple highlighting denotes tag commands.  This is the first word or words typed after the '<', and they tell the webpage that everything that comes after it will be acting or looking a certain way.  In the case of the screen shot above <title>  is saying that everything after it will be a title and the webpage will now feature the piece of text that comes after <title> bolder and in a larger font.

The blue is broken up into two uses in Firefox.  There is blue and blue underlined. Anything blue is a relation, location, or description connected to the purple tag preceding it.  It is blue underlined when it pertains to a website link.

The green text pertains to anything that is a comment within the code.  It will not showup on the website and is not read by the website.  Notice the "<!--" that starts and finishes the green area?  The '!' is a tag that explains just that to the website.   Web designers use this to give aid in editting the source code later on.  It is also used to hide "styles" and "scripts" from older versions of browsers where those two things were not supported to ensure that it doesn't show up as print on the screen.

The red "/" is used primarily to signal the end of a tag.  As you may have noticed initially there is a pairing between the <purple> tags.  There will be a <purple> followed somewhere down the line by a </purple>.  It is the "/" at the beginning of the later tag that tells the web browser that that tag has completed its action.  However, there are some cases where they don't need a pairing and instead can just finish a single line of code with a " /" and in the case of the Firefox HTML source code rendering it is red.  

The final color is black. It is everything else; it is the text that you will ultimately see on the screen, and it is the modifiers that describe the hieght and width of images that will posted, etc.  Now bear in mind that this is just how the source code is rendered on Firefox.  On Internet Explorer it is quite different.  I didn't spend a lot of time figuring out the differences but my initial observation is that Internet Explorer uses A LOT of colour, which I found confusing.  But I am guessing there is a rhyme and reason for it.  I just didn't have the time to adequately look into it.

So that is it, thus far, on the HTML basics (part 1).  My next post will be in a couple of days and it will be on "Cascading Style Sheets" or CSS (you may notice reference to it in the above screen shot).

Day 2: Links, Pics and Movies!

Today it all starts to come together!  Today the content gets spruced up!  Today I shall learn to link to websites, post pictures, and place movies!!  I hope you guys are as excited as I am!

Yesterday's post made it clear that the quest for knowledge may not always be as simple and direct as I had hoped.  That said, in comparison, today's post was incredibly straightforward.  I confess I did spent more time figuring out what to do than I needed to.  I initially started off surfing through the Bloggers "Getting Started Guide" looking for clues on how to add hypertext links. While I was unable to find any advice on how to setup a hypertext link, the "add a video" and "add an image" directions were quite straightforward.  When I finally decided to give up on looking for hypertext, and got to work on learning how to add videos and images, I realized that right next to them on the post editor toolbar was a hypertexted link button.  {face palm}  It looked a little like this:

It is just this incredibley EASY!  Big YAY on that one.  Because I wasn't too interested in having to spend a couple of hours surfing the interwebs trying to find answers only to realize that there were other questions I needed to ask first to get there.  So yes, good times!

And finally I shall prove my newfound blog skills by finishing this post off with an incredible 2min documentary from the National Film Board of Canada.

Enjoy!  So far I still am.

Tomorrow: Learning about HTML!

Day 1: To Pick a Place to Blog...

To start off on my intended path I realize that there is a lot I don't know.  Not just about what goes into making a blog, but about what goes into making a webpage.  I intend to explore both over the course of this week.  But for this, my first day, my intent is to explore the different website options for the hosting of blogs (the name blog, incidently, was a shortening of the term "weblog" which was made popular by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997).

I have spent the last couple of hours surfing a bunch of different blogging website options and all I can say is WOW!  What have I gotten myself into?  There are websites devoted strictly to blogging, such as Blogger, TypePad and Word Press. Then there are websites aimed at journalers, like Open Diary, Living File and My-Diary.  And finally there are the hybrids; places that offer a mix of blogging and social networking such as Live Journal, places that offer tools for website creation targetted at bloggers like Squarespace, and places that are, ultimately, online content management systems (CMS) which are used by people to host their blogs in the cases of Drupal, Textpattern, and Tripod.

In the end, learning about the different options available has raised more questions than it has answered and leaves me a bit bewildered at the task ahead of me.

A question that may arise from those of you reading is "Why Blogger?"  I wish that I could offer up a compelling and well-researched backing for my choice, but unfortunately the answer is: it was the first one I looked at that caught my eye.  {smile}

For Tomorrow: An exploration of some of the tools used in basic website creation (hypertext, links, etc.).

In the Beginning... (An overview)

Hi there, 

My name is Nathaniel.  I'm 34; just turned in fact.  And as this day, the anniversary of my birth, approached, I thought to myself, I need something challenging to engage my senses for the next year.  And so this Blog was concieved.  

The idea is simple.  

I intend to learn something new everyday.  It could be something as simple as learning to tie a bowline, or setting up a blog account(which incidently is the activity of this, my first day).  Or as complex as....  well...  I haven't gotten that far.  

But if anything it will be interesting. 

My intent is to have a different theme for each week, with a more grand and complicated project culminating with the end of each month.  This first week will be Blog/webpage setup and programming.  I know, not the most interesting stuff (and I'm guessing if you are here reading this post you probably already know how to set up a blog page).  But trust me it will get better.  {grin}