Welcome to Daniel's PPLP web site!

(PPLP: Personal Parallel Learning Project)

Last updated Friday, March 22, 2002. History still only updated through February 23.

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My nephew Cam:
cabinet investigator extraordinaire
who has absolutely no grasp of the importance of the Super Bowl.

Introduction and Breaking News

New webhost, spring 2003!

PS: Cam looks much older now.

New: Don't eat those cookies! They're old!

There isn't any actual new content to read, but you can poke around and tell me what you think of the new structure. I'll be on the road and, probably, actually working for money for the next week or so, so we'll have to see how much time I can devote to adding History content. Until then, thanks for checking up on the site.

PS: I am in a hurry to FTP this new structure up to the site, and I have an inkling that I may have overlooked something about storing the cookie between visits. If you notice that the new cookies don't hang around, let me know. This should be a simple fix when I have a few minutes.

Kind of new: The picture of Cam and the "onMouseover" effect. (I'm sorry that the images are not the same size. Moving the pointer in slowly from the side can cause the viewer to have a seizure, like Japanese kids watching Pikachu. For best results, move the mouse pointer up and down over the center of the top edge. Eventually, when I get some kind of image editor, I'll fix this.)

Also, after finding telecomwriting.com, I have mostly given up writing about telecom.

Old: the bright yellow box announcing what's new. A "friend" went to my feedback form to give me the feedback that the yellow box was gaudy.

Please let me know you've visited.

If this is you're first time visiting, you may be interested in looking at the introduction. However, note that the telecommunications stuff is now being learned without any effort to regurgitate my understanding onto pages in this site. Also, I haven't yet written anything on Weight Watchers.

The heart of the site is the News/Construction History, but it's very long-winded, so you might want to check out the executive summary instead.

I've abandoned the telecommunications information part of the project, at least writing about what I've learned, but you can still look at what's there.

News/Construction History This is a very long-winded history with lots of words spent describing idiocy and hunger pangs. For an executive summary of the more practical points of my project, click here.

This is my datemarker JavaScript thing. (Would it properly be described as an 'applet'?) This feature was added for two reasons. First, the history was becoming bulky. New visitors didn't want to read it in one sitting (but not because it wasn't fascinating!), but, when they returned, it was a pain to find where they had left off. Some didn't like the reverse chronological presentation, though I felt putting the newest stuff at the top helped my frequent visitors to see whether or not there was anything new. Second, I needed a project to focus my JavaScript learning efforts. Here is the first version of my datemarker, um, applet. The idea here is that when you leave the site, you come back to the datemarker and choose the History date that you last read. When you come back (assuming it is within thirty days of your last visit), a link is created that allows you to jump to the oldest material you haven't read. The script works by placing a cookie on your system called "savedate". When you load the page, the cookie is read by the JavaScript, and the "jump to" hyperlink is created pointing to the oldest material that is new for you. I am still dealing with some user interface issues. I hope to get around to improving this feature. However, for the time being, I have let some other parts of the PPLP slip while I fiddled with my cookies. When I get back to this piece, I'm leaning toward making a separate page for each day with the datemarker and a link to the next day at the bottom. Feel free to suggest to me how you think it ought to work. When you opened this page, your date cookie value was set to: If you'd like to change this date, select it here: January_26_02 January_29_02 January_30_02 January_31_02 February_1_02 February_2_02 February_3_02 February_4_02 February_5_02 February_6_02 February_7_02 February_8_02 February_9_02 February_10_02 February_13_02 February_17_02 February_21_02 February_22_02 February_23_02 And click the button: Your current date cookie is set to: (If you want to create a link to your freshly set date mark, you have to refresh the page. I'm not really to the point of Dynamic HTML yet.) Note: I still have some question as to whether I have correctly set the expiration of the cookie 30 days from a site visit. For a while, my experimentation showed that the cookie was tied to my browser session, but I think I fixed the problem. If you notice that your date mark isn't saved, let me know. To write this script, I referenced the O'Reilly Loan Calculator example and downloaded a script from The JavaScript Source, specifically, this one. I didn't like the prompt interface, though, so I had to figure out how to get a selection from a picklist into my script. Also, I had to research the onLoad in the HTML <body> tag to get the link behavior I wanted.

January 26, 2002 January 29, 2002 January 30, 2002 January 31, 2002 February 1, 2002 February 2, 2002 February 3, 2002 February 4, 2002 February 5, 2002 February 6, 2002 February 7, 2002 February 8, 2002 February 9, 2002 February 10, 2002 February 13, 2002 February 17, 2002 February 21, 2002 February 22, 2002 February 23, 2002