Alta

From Expanding Your Horizons

Saturday, March 17, 2007

This past year has been a big hiking year for me. My friends and I often hike Mission Peak in Fremont, California on Saturday mornings. This past year, we hiked it faithfully pretty much every single week, in freezing cold and in deadly heat. Sometimes we hiked it twice in a row. Why did we torture ourselves like this? We were preparing to hike Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the U.S. "lower 48." Our entire group summited Mt. Whitney on September 1, 2006.

Our dog loves to go for long walks - at least an hour. She loves to hike Mission Peak. But nine months ago and again recently she has had an infected paw, and we think it is from the tough, rocky Mission Peak hike. We don't really want to stop taking her. She loves it. What to do? I am thinking about getting her some dog booties and reinforcing them with leather or some other tough material. What do you think? What is your suggestion? Both times she needed antibiotics that cost us $100 - Yikes! Please feel free to add your comments here.

Saturday, February 25, 2006

Years ago, I taught an Expanding Your Horizons workshop on Basic programming. A little programming, like math, is good for everyone to learn because it teaches reasoning and logic skills.

Around 1996 or so, I started leading a workshop on HTML. If you create your own web site or blog, you will need HTML knowledge.

Three or four years ago, I started leading a workshop on JavaScript. This is a lot of fun and can really spice up your web site. But many blog sites and web sites will not allow you to use scripts.

Two years ago, I began working at Sun Microsystems, Inc. in Silicon Valley. At Sun, pretty much every project has its own wiki site. This allows people located in Beijing, China; St. Petersburg, Russia; Prague, Czechoslavakia; Santa Clara, California; and many other places to easily share information about this project. How should we design this product? How should we solve this problem? What is the schedule for this project? I also have my own web page within Sun where I provide information about all the different projects I am working on. I also have a blog at Sun.

So learn some HTML and wiki markup and share information with the world!