Damascity

I’ve been getting a ton of feeds through my Google RSS Reader the past year or so. Unfortunately most are marketing heavy and don’t help me improve my language, especially my vocab. This was until I found out about DailyLit a couple weeks ago.

DailyLit will send you installments of public domain books through either email or RSS. The first one I signed up for is Pride & Prejudice. Since my first installment on August 3rd I’ve completed about 25% of it and am slowly increasing the feed rate.

I’ve been meaning to start reading some of the classics and this so far has been the perfect way for me.

There are countless studies done about the correlation between language mastery and business success. My language skills (grammar, vocab and writing) have always been pretty weak. One of the first steps I’ve taken to correct this is by expanding my vocabulary.

The three tools I’m using right now for improving vocabulary are:

1) M-W’s Word of the Day: comes straight to my inbox (Podcast available). Most of the words they send are words that I can use in daily life. Included in the email is the pronunciation (I caught myself mispronouncing many words through this service), definition, example statement and the best part the “Did you know?” section where they go into the etymology of the word.

2) Word a Day: I added this Facebook application about two weeks ago. It displays one word a day. It has been a little bit buggy so far but seems like it’s working much better now. The main plus is that every time I’m on Facebook (approx 4-7 times a week) I’m able to get a vocab reminder. The other nice part is the daily quiz which takes about 2 minutes to do. I’ve using this a couple times a week now.

3) Verbal Advantage: Popular book (Audio CD set available that goes through 500 key words and about 3,000 synonyms. After every 10-15 words there is a quiz to test what you’ve learned. I try to listen to this once a day during work for about 15-60 minutes.

Other Tools that I used:
4) One tool that I was using a couple years ago when I had my Sony Clie but haven’t used in a while is The Articulate Professional. Each month V.J. Singal sends a list of about 8 words that he notices are being used conversationally by influential people. The two best things about The Articulate Professional is that it focuses on words that you can use often and that with each word he includes 7 examples of usage in sample sentences. I found this repetition really helps make the words stick. I just subscribed again and will try to use it again.

5) Vocab Books: There are many decent vocab books out there. I haven’t used any in years. I’ll probably give one of them a go when I ship the rest of my books over.

6) The Classics: Reading the classics definitely help. This is something that I really have to get going. I haven’t read much fictional work the past few years.

I started learning CSS a couple months ago and found that it is not as difficult as I initially thought. I hesitated on learning it for a few years and feel kind of stupid that I did.

I got my first pages up about three months ago at:

• SunniPath Online Academy
• SunniPath Online Course Catalog
• A few other pages on the site

All these pages follow XHTML & CSS standards without the use of a WYSIWYG editor. I still have quite a bit of work left in getting the other pages up but it’s going well so far.

I strongly suggest those who want to learn to use the free CSS tutorial at WestCiv.com. From that point just Google specific issues. Lynda.com also has some affordable courses available.

I had my first class in Arabic calligraphy last week. I’ve been itching to do this for a long time but didn’t know where to get started. Lucky me when I moved to Jordan I found out that a master of calligraphy lived just one block down from me. Not only that but he holds a weekly free class each Friday morning.

So this week I have to go out and get some real supplies. The first thing he told me was to look out for the type of pen I get. A traditional Latin-based calligraphy pen is completely different from the needs of a Traditional Arabic calligraphy pen. Arabic calligraphy calls for a reed/pen that has an angled end.

Now that I’m starting to get a good grasp of CSS I would like to start some programming in the near future. Over the next couple months I want to solidify my grasp of CSS and begin the next step which is programming. The main question I have is whether to start with PHP or RoR? RORians seem to swear by how short & sweet the coding is, but PHP has a ton of OpenSource applications ready to work with. Any advice would be appreciated.