Feeling happier

I am feeling a bit happier about my Flash skills. It now looks as though I won't have to learn Flash's programming language Actionscript to do what I want to do. I can do it all through behaviours, or so the tutorials tell me. They seem more like misbehaviours at the moment. My buttons won't behave. Tomorrow I shall sit down in earnest with my Flash books as I have a day free of classes. I have promised myself a maths-free day tomorrow as I have been doing nothing but maths recently and the effort is getting to me. I thought I was signing up for a course on the internet. It doesn't feel like that at the moment.

No big deal

When I proposed setting up a small-scale music web site at university I didn't think it would be any big deal to incoprorate two buttons, one to start playing a music file and the other to stop play. Well I have succeeded in doing that within the application-building arena within Flash 8 but when I try running the application the buttons won't start or stop sounds. This is frustrating. It rather looks as though I am going to have to learn some programming. I rather hoped I would avoid that but it increasingly looks as though there is no other way round it.

Greek 

There are three Greek girls in my maths class. I think it must be a peculiar kind of torture to learn maths in a foreign language but they do well. They even taught the maths lecturer a lesson. They asked why English people pronounce  as pie. In Greek they pronounce it as "pea". That may be technically correct but given the sense of humour of school children and students I don't think the British mathematical community will start talking about "pea". Nice thought though.

Techy Woes

I felt so pleased with myself when I rolled up to PC World. I knew exactly what I wanted - a USB 2.0 hub and a portable hard drive. They had the devices in stock. I had the cash. It was a deal. Then when I tried to install the software for the hard disk the application wouldn't accept the serial number. To make matters worse I had spent all day doing maths problems. I was tired and hungry. I have emailed support but as it is Sunday I don't expect anything until Tuesday. Curses, curses, curses.

Confused

I am in a muddle. Today in maths we did logarithms and exponentials. I don't remember them at all. I suspect I never knew. Any how it is trigonometry next week and I have definitely forgotten that. I have, however, bought a slim volume on Flash and a worthy O'Reilly tome on PCs. Am very tired. I think I'll resort to the sleep method of problem solving.

Digging for victory

My hands feel dried out, my back feels stiff and yet I am satisfied. With the help of my mother I planted up my front garden with two rhododendrons, six heathers and eighteen pansies. I find gardening difficult. Thinking in three dimensions is bad enough. I lack enough knowledge of plants to know what is going to look good with what but to make matters worse there is the time dimension. Plants change and I lack the imagination to see how plants grow and die. I'm not good too at knowing what will grow in my area. All this business about pH levels leaves me perplexed. I'm just not a natural gardener. The best plants I have planted are my box balls. All they need is a twice-yearly trim and they seem to thrive. That has not been the case with some other of my plants. I have a long list of casualties, due no part to neglect. I forget to water and tend my plants so it is only the most hardy specimens that survive.

Sound For the Web

Today I made a special trip to Cambridge to find out how to use a Marantz portable digital recorder. It doesn't look to difficult. Just hook it up to the USB port and the computer treats just like a hard disk. The sound files appear just like any other data files. At Anglia they use Audacity, a free sound editor, to edit sound files. I can download it but I am not sure that I want to do a lot of sound editing on my computer as my hard disk only has 72 GB of storage space. The good news is that I can borrow the digital recorder overnight or over the weekend. I found a copy of the manual on the web so it looks like I am in business as a sound recordist.