Those southern California wildfires are something! Sheesh. Talked to Daniel's parents and Stephanie today, all of whom live in the San Diego area. They're close to the coast, and so their homes have not been directly menaced by fire, but it's still sounding pretty apocalyptic down there. The sky is a dark red color at two o'clock in the afternoon, and it hurts to breathe if you're outside for more than a few minutes. Everyone's pretty much holed up in their homes.

I really hope that they can get the fires under control before they cause more damage or loss of life.

It's kind of scary. We get wildfires up herein the Bay Area in the hills, too, sometimes. The apartment that I'm moving too next month sits practically smack up against a bunch of those lovely sculptured-looked baked-brown hills. Mother nature's tinderbox.

Ah, well.

In happier news, I attended a one-day class on Dreamweaver today, over at the Institute for Computer Technology in Sunnyvale. I'll admit that I went partly because my boss wanted me to and was willing to foot the bill, but I ended up learning a lot from the class. It's a well designed course: they basically start you with a partially built website, and walk you through a set of exercises in which you complete it. Lots of hands-on stuff, lots of back-and-forth with the instructor, minimal twiddling of thumbs. I recommend them if you're looking for a little kickstart to your software skills.

I've been rebuilding my homepage as a Dreamweaver learning exercise, so you may get to see a few of the neat tricks I've learned. Though not all - a persistent "problem" I run into is that while I know how to do all kinds of weird crap, I don't have much in the way of content on my pages that calls for much more than one or two columns of nice readable sans-serif text. Maybe the odd JavaScript rollover for effect.

Maybe I'll do a "Gratuitous Abuse of Dreamweaver" page, just to get it all out of my system. That could be fun.

So, tomorrow night Daniel and I are off on the red-eye flight to the World Fantasy Convention. Wheeee! We'll be back Sunday, and I expect I'll post some kind of con report, but given how long it usually takes me to recover from these sorts of things, it's likely to be a week before I post again.

Have fun, all!