About Me
I got my first computer in November of 2000. It was bought on Ebay and unfortunately it started having problems almost immediately. The hard drive was the first item to go bad. I couldn't afford to have someone work on my puter so I had to learn to do it myself. After replacing the hard drive with a new one, I was still on a first name basis with the blue screen of death. The CPU was an AMD K-6/2 400. The mother board only supported an AMD K-6 300. Correcting that problem stabilized the computer and brought blessed relief from the many "blue screens of death".
I wasn't sure just what I wanted to do with the computer, other than get on line. I soon found the limitations of a 300Mhz CPU. I started to save some extra money and about 10 months later built a new tower with a 1gig processor and 256mb of DDR ram. Now I had a machine I could work with.
Surfing the web was great fun and I spent hours there. Then it occurred to me that I could make a web page, or at least learn how. I had looked on the internet for some tutorials but most of the time they left me with more questions than they answered. After all, there were the different versions of HTML, there was JavaScript, Java, other programming languages I thought I would have to learn, and then this new stuff called DHTML.
I finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel one day while cruising the electronics department at Wal-Mart. There right in front of me was the "Complete Idiots Guide to Creating A Web Page" written by Paul McFedries. Being the complete idiot I am and being attracted to the orange and white cover, I bought the only copy they had.
The Complete Idiots Guide was written just for me. One week and many practice pages later I put my first page in the free storage area my ISP provides. It was only a few pages, very crude and graphics intense. The content was nothing but poodle puppies that we had for sale. Everyone wanted to see the puppies and I thought it would be easier for them to just go to the web page and see if they were interested. It worked and from there I started refining my work.
I still have a lot to learn, especially when it comes to JavaScript and style sheets. I have found that I can't live without style sheets and that JavaScripts are an important part of web design. I have different editing programs but mainly stick to UltraEdit32 as my main editor as I hand code everything. I had tried FrontPage but I just couldn't get things placed just like I wanted them and was forever going in and changing the code by hand.
