Always Learning

What joy to awake every morning in a world so filled with things to learn.
--H. M. Kriz (1994)

Granddaddy, there's so much to learn!
--Granddaughter Elizabeth, age 2 years, 8 months (3/2005)

This page is dedicated to lifelong learners.
May your voyages on the Internet be interesting and fruitful.

Much has been said about learning

Welcome

Since September 1994, I've been running this "Always Learning" web site from a desktop computer in my office at Virginia Tech. (You can get more details about the hardware changes from the server statistics page.) Over the years I started hosting a couple of other web sites, so the little computer in my office is kept quite busy serving people around the world.

On this home page I've gathered a few links to things I'm learning about now, to some things I learned about years ago, and to some places where I like to start browsing. Pages O' the Day includes some places on the web that I don't want to forget about. The site also includes a variety of other resources that may or may not be linked from this page or it's links. From time to time I mention those resources here.

Gardening: Spring 2008 has been a delight here in Blacksburg. The flowering trees seem more lush than usual, perhaps because of the mild and wet weather. My Aerobic Garden page describes the asparagus picking, with the first few spears ready to eat on April 17 and production leaping to 1 to 2 pounds every couple of days by April 23. It's time to forget about Internet Gardening and do the real thing in real soil.

DVD-Video: I have gained more experience making video slide shows from my digital photos and from my old and precious VHS tapes. My father made these tapes about 18 years ago from his 8-mm movies. Most are in color, but some are in black and white. Like old newsreels, they chronicle our family life in the 1940's and 1950's. If you are in doubt about the value of all those family photos and movies you have thrown in a box and stored away in a closet somewhere, just hold on to them for 30 or 40 or 50 years. The value of your work will become manifest to you and yours.

CD-Audio: My ancient Garrard Lab 80 turntable that I bought in 1964 has finally stopped working reliably. It turns too slowly to allow me to transfer any more of my old LP records to CD. So that project is now on hold.

For you young folk who might be reading this, LP stands for Long-Playing record, the 33-1/3 rpm vinyl discs that appeared commercially in the late 1940's and disappeared rapidly in the 1980's as compact discs took over the market. I mention this only because a young clerk in a "record" store where I bought a CD version of the original stage production of South Pacific (with Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin) hadn't heard the term "LP."

A more challenging audio project continues to be the cleaning up of some old tapes of myself singing and playing guitar back in my college years. Also almost ready to put on CD are my grandfather's rendition of "On Top of Old Smokey" and his recitation of "Dangerous Dan McGrew." They were recorded originally on reel-to-reel tape using a Wollensak tape recorder in 1956 and later copied to cassette tape. They now reside on my hard drive. I've learned in doing this work that those who blithely say that we will just recopy to new media everything we have on obsolete media probably have never faced the reality of doing the work themselves.

Digital Photography: In 2002, I discovered the liberation that comes with digital photography. I've accumulated about 10,000 photos since then. I enjoy turning them into DVD slide shows, large format prints, and personalized collages that I give to relatives and friends.

I still haven't found time to scan our family's 35mm slides. These date back to the mid-1950s when I got my first 35mm camera, an Argus A-four. It was the successor to my Kodak Brownie box camera that used 620 black & white film. Eventually I graduated to a Honeywell Pentax Spotmatic SLR, and then moved on to digital cameras in 2002.

Searching the Web

Search engines, with their half-baked algorithms,
are closer to slot machines than to library catalogues
                              --David Rothenberg
                              Chronicle of Higher Education
                              p. A44, August 15, 1997

AltaVista

An early search engine that I do not hear about much these days. It was a project of Digital Equipment Corporation, but it is now owned by Overture Services Inc. I keep it linked here for old times sake.

Google

Winner of PC Magazine's Technical Excellence Award for 1999, it has become the market leader among search engines and turned itself into an Internet empire. 

Yahoo

The other big search engine, which doesn't get as much respect as it deserves. Yahoo remains my favorite starting point for searching as it often seems to take me more directly to where I want to get.

WWW Virtual Library

This oldest catalog of the Web is a distributed subject catalog maintained by volunteers. It includes links to other virtual libraries.

Remember When

Remember when the Internet was young, when we needed packet drivers to use our gopher client, before we knew about viruses and worms and other network predators? Then my learning projects included TCP/IP networking and web authoring. I wrote some web-based tutorials back then that still get viewed a few hundred times each month.

Windows and TCP/IP for Internet Access

My tutorial describes how you can set up your personal Windows machine for navigating the internet. First published as an ASCII file in November 1993, this hypertext version has reached many tens of thousands of readers in more than 80 countries. Both Windows 3.1x and Windows 95 are covered. Emphasis is on software that is available free of charge via the Internet. Although numerous books are now available on this topic, this paper provides a concise summary of the basic concepts.

Teaching and Publishing in the Web

Anyone with a Windows or Mac desktop computer can deliver information via the World Wide Web. This tutorial provides the knowledge you need to get started as a desktop Webmaster.

For details about the requests for this and other pages in the Always Learning web,
see the "Always Learning" server statistics.