Calling A Method To The Main

I have been reading about methods and I do have a beginner level understanding on how they work. I was trying to mess around and make a dog calculator using methods. I ran into a small snag; I cannot get the method to call to the main or the program to compile correctly. The first code below is the original. To me it looks like (based off of some examples I looked at) there should be no problems, but NetBeans gives me a few errors. 1) line 8- "cannot find symbol, variable dogYearCalc; 2) line 18 illegal start of expression; and 3) line 22 - unreachable statement.

import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
public class KrisExample {
public static void main (String[] args) {
double dogYears = 0;
JOptionPane.showInputDialog (null,"Please enter you dog's age in human years:");

[Code] ....

Someone told me that I was calling dogYearCalc without any arguments in your main method. I take that to mean that I needed to add it to the main, so I did here:

public static void main (String[] args, double dogYearCalc) {

That got rid of my first error, but then when I tried to run the program NetBeans said that I have no main class, so switched back to the original program above.

I thought that when I calling the dogYearCalc method on line 10 was the whole purpose of using a method. It seems to me that putting it somewhere in the main is counter productive.