Climb to the Shrine, Right What Is Wrong

Now all I need is... um...

Projects time! :D

@_@ The bugs... in those JQuery exercises... were horrible...
(But it WAS hilarious that the exercise focusing on tabbed menus had a nearly course-breaking error with its tabs. Thank goodness for the Q&A Forums.)

Anyway, now I can try PHP and Projects!

Now I have CodeYear, PHP, and Projects to finish...

D: Well, at least I won't run out of uses for my "Codecademy: 20 lessons" Habit on HabitRPG any time soon, I guess...

(Think I like Python more than Ruby... and possibly Javascript, at this point. The notation's relatively elegant, and the indents are a lot easier to keep track of than {}-pair-#12. Javascript was too formal, and Ruby wasn't quite rigid enough for me. Python's a nice compromise.

I admit that I may change my mind depending upon what language I'm doing at the moment.)

I... dang. 70 days ago, I didn't know any programming beyond a little bit of C++, and now I know the basics of three languages. :S I haven't made this much progress since I was an undergrad... That may be why I enjoy it so much. *sigh* I get bored with things once the rate of reward drops off. It's a despicable flaw, but I'm not sure how to get rid of it... yet. The flaw will be smashed.

And 49% on Python. Hooray!

In Python,

You type

for THINGY in LIST:

not

for THINGY in LIST

as Python gets VERY tetchy about the lack of a colon. Deathly-Hallows!JKR/Python programming language OTP!!!

...Also, you use "def" to define a function, not "function". -_-;; I hadn't touched the Python section in a while - can you tell?

It's amazing how much time in the day one has when one's incentivized. >_>

Currently reviewing HTML on Codecademy.
Have done 20 reps of a minor exercise today.
Reached L2 on Habit RPG.
(Incidentally, I beat a battle on Shining Force. Main character, darn you, stop gaining MP! You have ONE spell used to reset battles, and it costs 8 MP! You do NOT need anything higher than that, much less 12 MP!)

On another site...

Brush Teeth
1h Personal Project
Exercise
45m Reading

...*sighs and opens up textbooks* On the bright side, this DOES make one concentrate...

Want to play a quick hand of Blackjack? Right this way!

...I hadn't hit any Challenges for a while. :) I like the Challenges. They actually make me do something useful.

(*cringes* Meanwhile, I take a hit of 4.6/50 HP points on Habit RPG because I blew off my Dailies and other Habits to do 3x "Codecademy: 20 lesson" Habit entries. Damnit. That'll teach me to procrastinate...)

It was an interesting discovery that your output windows work as you showed them in the initial advertisement for the new interface once you zoom out one notch via Ctrl + -.
You realize that's not the default size?

Yours in Amusement,
Guardian's Song

P.S. I completed the Ruby course! :D Now, back to Code Year...

Given my amazing powers of procrastination-creativity, that should impel me to cure cancer, reinvent the toilet, and do all my academic work within the week. >_>

Also, who do I have to lightly slap with a fish at Codecademy to get the site to stop going into "Disconnected. Please try again." fits? Because it keeps spitting those out at random, and it's a little annoying. (Hmm, seems to have cleared up... That's good. Must have been a server issue.)

Also, I'm up to 90% on Ruby on Codecademy. Progress! :)

[...And also, Ruby objects seem to have much less random syntax than JavaScript ones, for which I can only say 'Thank gad'. It, er, helps that I'm beginning to learn the same things in several different languages. Of course JavaScript was the hardest - it was the one for which I had no foreknowledge! :P]

Man, this course is quick...

By the way, have you tried out the beta Create Entries page on Dreamwidth? It will look hideous at first, so you need to hit the gear icon on the top bar to modify your options and drag around the various panels.

This is freaking revolutionary. If they would only *COUGH*add the rich text editor*COUGH*, I'd be in journaling heaven.

---

Also, according to the Authentic Happiness site, my top strengths are:
Your Top Strength
Creativity, ingenuity, and originality
Thinking of new ways to do things is a crucial part of who you are. You are never content with doing something the conventional way if a better way is possible.

Your Second Strength
Love of learning
You love learning new things, whether in a class or on your own. You have always loved school, reading, and museums-anywhere and everywhere there is an opportunity to learn.

Your Third Strength
Humor and playfulness
You like to laugh and tease. Bringing smiles to other people is important to you. You try to see the light side of all situations.

Your Fourth Strength
Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
Thinking things through and examining them from all sides are important aspects of who you are. You do not jump to conclusions, and you rely only on solid evidence to make your decisions. You are able to change your mind.

Your Fifth Strength
Kindness and generosity
You are kind and generous to others, and you are never too busy to do a favor. You enjoy doing good deeds for others, even if you do not know them well.

---

So I'm a loony nerd with a sense of humor, a tendency to overthink things, and... a great deal of generosity? Well, the first four fall under the category of "me and three-quarters of the Internet". Fifth... eheheh, before you congratulate me too much, you should take the test yourself and see what other strengths didn't make the top five. You know, little things like diligence, self-control, optimism*, forgiveness...

*My scores on an optimism test basically said that I think good and bad things are equally fleeting, that good events are caused by certain factors, and bad things pervade everything around them. ...The classical sources agree with me. :B *dodges bricks*

...Ruby has some pretty neat notation, doesn't it?

I take it other languages have more power or somesuch (and Javascript has jQuery, for internet purposes) - but Ruby certainly looks pretty.

...Python's best for science, eh? :S I actually need to use a Python-based program for my research, so I might need to drop Ruby and veer hard right to Python soon. I have 67% done on Ruby - that's pretty good, right?

My main fear of Python is that I seem to remember some programmers complaining about Python teaching people bad habits once, but... shikata ga nai, SAGE uses Python, so Python I'll learn.

Oh gad, this thing actually cares about whitespace? :S I am suddenly acutely worried...

The indifferent news is that it will have to be kept all on one page due to, ehem, my strong commitment to the internet 'How Much Can I Legally* Get Without Paying Anything?' ethos. >_>

That's actually TIME-SAVING, though, since the original project did have it all smushed together.

*Had to add this after realizing the original 'How Much Can I Get Without Paying Anything?' had unfortunate implications in the piracy era.


...And if I ever redo Dragon Fighter, I will forcibly disable the buttons until each flash is over. Despite the warning in the 'manual', I always end up making myself a bit ill with my rapid clicking. :\

Anyway, here it is, in case Codecademy ever dumps its cached projects.

I should update the Angelfire site further, but I'm really not feeling like it right now. :\ Sorry. The process of updating the HTML is... rather painful, since Dreamwidth/LiveJournal no longer automatically add <br/>s and Angelfire has an atheistic attitude towards plaintext linebreaks, but things may improve now that I've found this site, which automates such modifications. (Yes, I manually added <br/>s to all of the How James Got His Mojo Back sporking. That may explain a bit as to what temporarilly broke my will to update Angelfire.)

6 new lessons are up!

I'm 37% of the way through Ruby. Have stalled on Code Year due to a temporary fear of recursion, but am now progressing again.

...It also helps that I've managed to curb all other procrastination tools to the point where this is my primary one. :) Learning is fun.

More online education courses should be motivated with points, percentages, and lots of shiny badges. >_> Also... I'm mousing around through free website hosting to see if I can host things off of Codecademy. Pardon me, but I'm acutely nervous about the long-term hosting capacities of an educational website. :\ Now, just a moment, I'm trying something.

Edit: ...Okay, disregard that. Apparently Dreamwidth is solidly allergic to in-post forms, even if it seems to allow it initially. I'm tempted to try Dragon Fighter, but let's just say I'm cynical about the whole mess.

...Tried it in a private entry. Cynicism justified. :P Free website hosting it is.
Webs doesn't permit Javascript, but Yola and Angelfire (?) seem to do so, so I'm planning on moseying on over to Angelfire. If that doesn't work, I'll jump to Yola.
[Why Angelfire? Because I know there are Angelfire pages that haven't been touched for years - probably over a decade, in some cases - and yet are still up. So they definitely don't delete for inactivity or go on arbitrary deletion rampages. I consider this a very good thing, so I'm siding with them first.]

...*resists the urge to sob with nostalgia* I just found one, on an unrelated search, that lists dates from 2001 as upcoming release dates. I feel so old. But my inner nine-year-old feels so validated. All hail the ETERNAL Internet!

(...Also, for all that I mock and dislike LiveJournal's changes, I appreciate its free image hosting. ...Thanks, LiveJournal. Nutty though you are... thanks.)

On a more amusing note, check out a guide on Everything Done Wrong In Bad Webpages. That's not quite the name, but that's certainly its intent. :)

Need to sleep.

...Need to do homework due on Tuesday... and research, due probably last week... D:

Ah well. Now that I realize I need to get my rear in gear? It's time to stop fooling around with other music and settle down to Livin' On A Prayer (Power Remix) and Alex Rentz's MIDI of the Rayquaza-battle theme*. ...To those with auditory sensitivities, I should note that both tracks have a constant drumbeat going on in the background - which is what makes them work for me, but may be counterproductive for you. It's covered up by horns and flourishes and such, and is not in the foreground of either track, but if your brain doesn't like the beat, it cannot be helped.

For me, however, those tracks cause an increase in "goal-oriented behavior", as the fancy medical articles put it. So here we go...

Need to put both of them on my iPod, darn it...

*The actual track doesn't work because it alternates ears. That's nice and all, but the constant drumbeat is what drops my brain out of la-la land.

YA Paranormal Romance Blurb Generator

Come on, come all! Don't you want to see your brilliant Mad Libs abomination totally original plot? :)

Here's an example of a possible blurb:( Come on, take a look! :D )

Find it here!

...I'm currently incorporating it into my Project Page using code from Halrloprillalar's Drabble Generator.

( C-Codecademy, did you REALLY mean to put that in as your example? )


...So, I think the exercise managed to accidentally give the entire page-source as its "example". 

Uh. Well, that was educational...
(No, I didn't read the whole thing. I probably WOULD learn an enormous amount if I read through it all, but - um - AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE!)

[The button gradient comes from this link:http://line25.com/tutorials/how-to-create-a-stylish-button-entirely-with-css3]

The page beyond that button has a list-maker and Dragon Fighter minigame. Behold, I have proof!

( I have screenshots! )

So, er... if you have a minute, think about checking it out. I took more time than I should have on doing those mini-apps, but it turned out pretty well, in the end. If I had a few weeks with no other obligations (like those petty little trivialities known as "sleeping", "bathing", and "eating"), I could probably spit out Dragon Warrior I in its entirety.

...Which a halfway-decent programmer could probably do in a few hours with heavy copy-pasting. *facepalm* Regardless, this was probably a better use of my Saturday evening than trying to get through the next chapter of Hector Hard Mode, so I'm taking this as a positive thing. :) :D 8D :D :D

Course is broken - "Submit" button doesn't work. At all.
ACTUALLY, I just needed to tell NoScript to allow scripts from [IP Address] 54.243.202.158. Yes, I am stupid enough to have NoScript running on a programming website. If I ever claimed to be a genius, I never claimed IQ correlated to actual common sense and competence. :P

Bleeeh humbug. :P Off to jQuery and Javascript again. At least the jQuery course is working all right now.

[Ha. This Nils icon may be the most helpful icon I ever made. Shock and awe works well for so many things. ...LJers, know that I'm talking about this icon, which was derived from a Fire Emblem Texts From Last Night post:

The context, by the way, was...

*snork* Poor Nils...]

*facepalm* Um... avoid this one, guys! At least, until they get around to debugging this course...

[I've literally been able to do exercises on the side waiting for a given jQuery exercise to clear its cache and register that I submitted a correct solution. Bleeeeh. :P On the bright side, the Code Year exercises are fun!]

Dynamic HTML is the spawn of the underworld.* D| On the bright side, the Code Year Javascript courses seem clearer than the default courses, which is a good thing to know.

*It actually isn't that bad, but the jQuery interface is weirdly buggy, so I can't tell whether it's refusing to pass me onto the next exercise because I got it wrong or because the system hasn't understood that I have the correct input in there yet. And then it passes me half the time when the code is blatantly working not as it should. *facepalm* The Q&A Forums have had the right answers so far, so that helps.

In real life, got homework turned in, and am feeling better than usual about life! On the other hand, have touch of stomach flu. -_-;; Probably got it from the neighbors or fellow classmates... Not so bad, really, except, y'know, it wears you down for a few days. I'll be fine soon, though!
Need to do research. Need to... get more sleep and slack off less, really. :\ *zonks out*

I finished the JavaScript track!

Now, I... er... yeek!

*recovers* I think I'll tackle jQuery next. It seems to be the... shortest of the remaining courses. Mm, yep. Definitely the shortest.

I might also dabble in the Code Year track for extra projects - the Objects part of the Javascript course was hard for me to remember (and it didn't help that I did much of that course after midnight on various nights), so it will be good to have a review.

console.log("Hey, 20 days ago, I didn't know a single line of Javascript, and now I can program in it!");
console.log("...A little, at any rate.");
console.log(" ");
var me = {me.recitation();

(...And with my luck, I completely botched the syntax of that one. *checks* Huh, no, actually, I got it right! ...Wonders never cease.)

Unfortunately, they only have the first section up right now... But they'll keep writing it as time goes on!

"Create an object called BMW, which should
have 3 properties: a cost of "too much",
a speed of 220 and country of
"Germany""

(And yes, this is getting to be my favorite icon. It fits so many things... and I really like green.)

...I should note that I really, really DO recommend Codecademy with the fervor of any new convert. With all due respect to all the other fun activities on the web, it's the only recent one that I can remember that made me actually learn something. XD And it's fun! Really!

Notes:
Contrary to what you might think...
At least at first (i.e. with the HTML/CSS and early JavaScript portions)...
1) It requires absolutely no mathematical or logistical abilities.
2) It requires nothing more than a working keyboard and internet connection.
3) If there are any problems, the Hint will usually tell you what you should be doing.
4) You can probably finish a few exercises in about the same amount of time it takes to mass-click 300 Pokemon in the Berry Feeder on GPXPlus while mashing the 1,2,3,4,5 keys at full speed.
4a) The amount of time it takes to finish a full section feels like about the same amount of time it will take to mass-click those Pokemon.
Also...
5) To be really cynical? ...It's set up in the rapid action-reward system that hypnotizes people with ADHD-like traits. >_> Put music on, sit down in a comfortable chair, and drift happily through the lessons. Heck, open up tabs and jump between track courses and non-track courses - it isn't going to stop you. Just make sure said courses are all in the same programming language so that you don't end up bewildered by syntax errors. :P

(Remember, you can always go to Codecademy Labs to run code of your own for Python, Ruby, and JavaScript. No on-computer compiler needed!)

[...Also, the "high" mood refers to the feeling of doing courses, NOT ingesting any controlled substances. I was off of caffeine again as of Friday. :P ]

Here you go. (Assuming my code is sound, that is. And I very much hope it is, because if it isn't, then I need to go headdesk a few times...)

I would advise only typing in numbers under 100,000, as it starts to lag around there. And I don't want to blow up your browser. >_> And, er, it should go without saying that you'd have to do a lot of scrolling if you put in a number that large and didn't specify that you only wanted to see so many primes less than that number...

...What, precisely, is your definition of a "month"?