So here I am, finally trying to do what I'm supposedly best at and what I hate the most: writing. I'm just going to briefly state my thoughts on the first week's assignments.
Blog Setup
Let's see. There's creating a blog. This was old hat for me, since I have already setup seven blogs on three different services. Not that there's much to do. It's the writing that's the "hard" part. Tedious part, actually. I have an English degree, love picking at grammar and proofreading and even editing. Even so, despite my seemingly natural talent for the written word and my propensity for rambling on and on about a favorite topic, actually starting to write or deciding what to write about has always been a struggle for me, along with always choosing the right tone and the right words. Because the process is a pain for me, I have always hated to write and have avoided it as much as possible.
It doesn't help that I'm a type-A anal retentive with ADHD and Asperger/High-Functioning Autism tendencies and spend more time tweaking and editing and revising and completely redoing than I do creating something. Oh well. I also have over 24 years of experience on computers and pretty much live online.
Web Portal
Oh, and I am a Mac user. This was a big deal with the "web portal" assignment on pageflakes.com. While FireFox was recommended for the entire course and particularly for this assignment (and is what I've been using for the last two months almost exclusively), I had to go into Safari to create an account at the site and create the modules and the page.
Yet that was the end of that. I could create an "anything flake" in Safari and type of copy-and-paste text, but I could not edit the text on my Mac and make it look how I want. Thankfully (I suppose), we're staying at mom's house and she had a work-issued Windows laptop that I could use. Definitely an annoying pain, but it worked, even though the boxes don't all look quite how I would like them to look.
This site was simply a pain in the rear in every conceivable way short of simply not functioning (which was how it actually appeared to me originally in Firefox for Mac).
Of course, I could dive into the look and feel of it and how "last decade" or even '90s it looks and feels like, but that's neither here nor there. I'll just state plainly that I will probably never use the site if I do teach for a living.
Word Processing
I don't have much to say about this assignment. Well, compared to the last one. It's creating a newsletter in a word processor. I used Pages because I like it better than MS Word and it actually supports my favorite font, unlike Word for some strange reason. You know, despite the fact that OpenType fonts were a collaboration between Adobe and Microsoft and the Myriad font files I have are OpenType. Details.
Here again, I have experience in desktop publishing and graphic design. I am very particular about design elements and opinionated about look and feel. Thus, generally, school teacher newsletters tend to be ugly affairs that offend every optic nerve I have that still functions (I am blind in one eye). I also hate Comic Sans and Times New Roman and have an aversion to the overly-popular Helvetica.
Needless to say, the samples provided did not impress me. I was bound and determined that mine would look as professional as a word processing application would allow. Thankfully, also, the latest version of Pages (and perhaps even Word) have page layout tools that quite nearly rival Adobe PageMaker 5.0, which is what I started on and loved dearly.
Epilogue
Yes, the guy who hates writing is very long-winded.
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