This is my eighth course at Capella and it may be the most
difficult one for me.  I have a long
history of using my quantitative skills to avoid any work that requires
artistic skill.  In Elementary
School, my Art grades were “Cs” and “Ds” and my
Arithmetic grades were “As”.
I think the “Cs” were gifts because I caused no trouble in
class.  In eighth grade wood shop, I
avoided having to saw in a straight line by doing all the measurements for the
people next to me so that they would do sawing for me.

In mainframe development, I debugged other people’s
Assembler Language programs so that they would do my screen layout maps.  In my technical work, I have done
everything that does not involve good art skills including database design and
implementation, technical design, programming in PHP, Java, Javascript,
HTML, SQL, and Cold Fusion.  I have
always thought that the most difficult design task is layout out overview
diagrams.  As you might guess, my
major was mathematics (computer courses were hard to find in 1966).

I am the volunteer maintainer of the North Shore Choral
Society Web Site (www.northshorechoral.org) .   (Music is a big exception to my problems
with the world of art.)

I am looking forward to learning Flash.  Flash actionscript
looks familiar to a programmer.  I
suspect that there are publicly available libraries that can help people who do
not draw well.  I also look forward
to seeing what Flash can do with text and technical diagrams. I teach part time
at Morton College and I am thinking of building a Flash
tutorial on Java objects that can be used in an introductory Java Programming
class.

Jim Miller