Cranial Soup

Thursday, October 11, 2007

Paul Adams: The Impossibility of Failure

I found an essay today, by a musician named Paul Adams. I happen to like some of his music, so I was doing a bit of research on him and found his MySpace page.

Usually, I will visit the MySpace pages of musicians I like, if they have one, in hopes of finding some free mp3's to download. This time was no different.

Instead I found this:

"... Hitting the wall and making mistakes provides us with invaluable lessons. Playing a guitar, driving a tractor, planting seed, painting a picture, etc. blooms best from error. Failing is a great teacher. Its Gods force of nature molding us like clay. BUT, this is a little different. Clay is the perfect deciple or student. Clay has no part in making the DECISION to become what it will be. It completely surrenders to the artist who molds it into form and reality. Man, on the other hand, has choice. Failure offers to mold us. It is a co-op between Man, God, and destiny. An artist, craftsman, or worker, can use life experience (Failure) as an interplay toward growth and learning. Get up, and have at it AGAIN!. Those who have had a completely smooth ride may not have had the opportunity to test themselves. *Those who do not choose to bend and flex with failure, are missing the opportunity to paint w/ nature and circumstance. They are saying no when God asks them to dance and adjust. They are denying an opportunity to seek out a different perspective. They are saying no when God asks them to learn from mistakes and become better at what they do. We are too busy reacting - we are not listening. ..."

Online HTML Editor

Sometimes you have the need to create a quick page for a specific purpose. And it would seem a bit silly to purchase an expensive HTML editor for just the occasional page. And you really don't feel like downloading & installing an application that you won't get much use from.

That's where this nice little editor comes in. It's simple to use and packed with tons of nifty features that you would expect to find in a desktop application.

This is the best free online HTML editor I have found that wasn't associated with some sort of web hosting.

Features:

Page Properties:
Interface allows you specify page title, background color, foreground (text) color, upload a background image from your computer and apply a watermark to the image so that it doesn't scroll, and upload a background sound file.
Find & Replace:
Search your page for text, tags, and images and automatically replace all with something else.
Highlight
Use this tool to "highlight" (specify a background color for) selected text.
Hyperlinks
Click to easily convert text to a hyperlink and apply hyperlinks to images.
Insert Images
Browse to locate an image file on your computer and upload it to your page.
Table Wizard
Easily insert and customize your tables. Specify number of rows and columns, alignment, border size, cell padding, and cell spacing. Tables aid in the layout of your page.
Insert Bulleted Lists
Insert Numbered Lists
Insert Horizontal Lines
Form Wizard
Step-by-step wizard helps you to create and insert simple forms into your web page.
Insert Text Fields and Text Boxes
Easy Text Formatting
Format your text by selecting font face, size, color, bold, italic, and underlined via familiar word processor type buttons.
Paragraph Formatting
One click aligns all left, right, or center.
Button Wizard
Easily insert buttons anywhere on your page!
MORE

Whatever isn't covered by the features in this editor will most likely be covered by their other online tools, listed on the right side of their page.

So no more excuses...go make that web page you have been procrastinating about!

http://www.creatingonline.com/webmaster/html_generator.htm

Online Privacy Policy Generator

Constructing a privacy policy for your website can be a complicated task, but it doesn't have to be any more.

With this generator it is as easy as checking off some boxes and filling in some blanks.

They give you the choice between generating an HTML page which you can just save, or emailing you an HTML or plain text copy.

http://www.the-dma.org/privacy/creating.shtml

Software for Starving Students

Software for Starving Students is a FREE downloadable collection of programs, put together with students in mind (but anybody can use it).

Everything is all on one a single disk. There are both Mac OSX and Windows versions available.

If you ever wanted an easy way to gather and install some the best free software available, this would be it.

Included applications:

OS X

Windows

http://softwarefor.org/

Friday, September 07, 2007

Blast from the Past

I have been looking for a bunch of old photos that have been lost in my house for about 2 years. I have looked everywhere for them, hoping they weren't lost forever. Most of these were taken when I was a teen.

My husband was the one who finally found them, under the bed with his baseball cards, of all places.

I decided to scan and share a few with you today.

This is me (age 20), holding my daughter when she was about a month old.

Me (age 16) and LuLu

Me, age 16.

Lil, me (age 16), and Tom.

This is me (age 16) and Dianne, on Tom's motorcycle, in Tom's garage. We were supposed to be doing the thumbs like the Fonz, but just as the picture was being taken, Tom moved the back of the bike and scared the crap out of both of us.

In my room, sitting on my bed.

from left to right: Liz, LuLu, and Dianne.

Me in back. (age 16)

Standing in front of my house in all the snow.

Age 19

Another from same day/location.

The illusion of having photographed 'falling snow' is a bit odd, since there was no snow actually falling. Some weird photography mishap that I had no idea about till the photos were developed.