Tuesday, January 08, 2002
|11:51 PM| Ah, the new imac is here at last. I wouldn't have known about it if JP hadn't said something. I'm so far removed from my previous Apple roots that when I sit in front of one, and know perfectly well how to operate the damn thing, I'm shocked. I mean, there are plenty of arguments, I won't go into them too much, they were true when I left, I bet they are still true. Faster proccessor, easier to learn, more stable OS. Fine. That's great. But Apple has now grouped itself in with the technology crowd that makes me sick when I'm worrying about really stupid shit like technology learning curves. That group of people includes AOL, Gateway, and any other group of assholes who are limiting the functionality and stripping away all the risk from computers. The new apple has one access door with a bunch of pictures so an ape could install RAM. That's fine, except that's all a user can do. They damn thing might as well be a magic box. In fact, that's exactly what it is. It has seperated a human from understanding what is involved in the functionality of the computer to the point where it might as well be magic. I don't think that's right. You should at least have some basic understanding of what the heck is going on in there.

My computer often breaks. Sometimes horribly, mostly because I don't know everything about it and I make mistakes when I'm moving stuff around in side of it, but I'm learning. It's like a constant adventure/puzzle game and I feel the same glee and sense of accomplishment when I fix what has gone wrong in my computer and expand it's functionality. I feel the same dissapointment and shame when I have to ask for computer help as when I have to peek at a hint guide for a Lucasarts adventure game.

The computer is not helping these people learn, or grow as people. Not really, since they have to have their hand held through the whole process, why bother? Sure Grampa can jump online and go to encylopedia.com and find out what kind of flowers he just found growing in the yard, but he was helped the whole way. What happens if a link in the chain is broken? What if the internet service provider goes out of bussiness or encyclopedia.com shuts down? Grandpa is utterly helpless. The magic box has failed. Grandpa cannot survive in the goddamn forest overnight because he would be eaten by an animal who still takes things seriously, like beetles or aggressive squirrels. Once it gets to the point where a Goddamn monkey can run our whole civilization, then what is the point of human beings, anyway? Doing things for yourself is the whole damned point as far as I'm concerned.

Okay, I've stopped making sense, I suppose I should go to bed.

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We need one created for the years, and then the months. The months are the /////tricky ones, since they need their ID to increase more than the years, but since the functions keep referencing ///// the same name system, we have to be careful not to make the years close up when we click on a month. ///Set some Variables $YearMenuID = 1; /////What ID the preceding year link controls. Needs to be same for all the months under a given year. $MonthMenuID= 1; ////What ID the preceding month link controls. Needs to be the same for all the weeks under a given ////Month but not the same as any year, etc. $LastYearUsed = 0; $LastMonthUsed = 0; echo '

'; /////That should be the "Year" div. All the years should be in this one DIV. ///Start the main loop. foreach ($myDateArray as $key => $value) { ////Pulling the year/date. $month = ExtractMonth($value); $year = ExtractYear($value); $YearMenuID = $year; $MonthMenuID = $month; $PrettyMonth = $MyDateArray[$month]; ////Is this a new year? If ($year != $LastYearUsed) ///Then we need to put the year down. No DIV created quite yet. { ///First off, we need to close the preceding year's DIV. Twice if it ain't 2001 if ($year != 2001) { echo '

'; } echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML2_; ///That creates a DIV for the year (month based links) then the month (week based links). ////Then the first weekly link. ///That should have made a link to the weekly archive file. ///As well as creating the first month link, which is in its own DIV, } Else { ///Okay, it's not a new year. So, we need to check if it's a new month. If($month != $LastMonthUsed) { //So it's a new month. That means we need to put down a link for the month to control the div //that contains the weekly links. //First, though, we need to close up the previous month echo '

$myDateArray[$key]

_HTML3_; } Else /////////So it's not a new month, then we just need to put down the weekly link. { echo '

' . $myDateArray[$key] . '

'; } } $LastMonthUsed = $month; $LastYearUsed = $year; } ECHO '