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