Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

First Day of Class
I made my way to 80 Spadina, the home of Toronto Image Works, where I'd be taking my class on PHP and MySQL. I climbed to the second floor and found the place: a large, meandering labyrinth of offices set in a converted warehouse space, the smell of film developer pervading the place.

I found my way to the classroom and I had my first shock -- the classroom computers were all iMacs. So I'd be learning a lot more than I'd initially expected, learning how to use an iMac as well as writing PHP/MySQL code.

It was an inauspicious start: the Internet connection was down, and the room was frigid -- both the result apparently of a power outage in the building over the weekend. The somewhat harried instructor spent a good chunk of the first hour trying to explain some PHP fundamentals while aiding in the efforts to restore the local network. This was good in that I managed to figure out my way around the iMac familiarizing myself with Mac OS 9, Fetch (an ftp program) and BBEdit (a Web editor).

The first day's code samples were pretty straightforward PHP. Enough to show that it can handle form processing creating a simple form whose inputted values are used as attributes to color elements on a target page. I did learn a few things about the formal terminology for some terms in PHP I didn’t know before, and it provided some insight into some programming aspects I had seen before, but didn’t fully understand. Now I do. ;-)