I learned many valuable things during my Year of Moving Constantly (covered in my previous blog series 6 Migrations - link to be updated post post). The primary lesson: Do not keep more than you can swim with (one hand free).
I have adhered to this valuable principle in all my efforts to build readership of this blog, and this post is one of many occasions where the enhanced mobility made possible by the light readership of the blog has rewarded this adherence. Yes, I'm changing direction again and starting a new series. No, this does NOT mean I won't EVER return to previous series. Think of this blog as a sort of verbal TV station where they do a LOT of pilots and they still haven't cemented a programming schedule but they never ever do reruns. YEs!
New pilot: Gateway to the Future - a brutally honest account of my personal attempt to learn computer programming, or "coding" as the young people call it. Lingo is important. My journey to VR will include many new terms, like "VR" which stands for "Virtual Reality", which is the future, especially for old people like me, who will be the first old people to be plugged into a VR cable and left to rot on a plastic recliner in a room strongly resembling a closet by our ungrateful children. That's if we're lucky. That's what this quest is all about. I don't mind the thought of living in video games at the end of my life, but I definitely want to be able to hack the system enough to verify that the attendants are changing my diapers and linens. Especially if the attendants are Russian. They might be robots, of course. So much the better, then I will be the secret boss of the living center, controlling everyone's meds and room assignments, scheduling snack time, who gets first dibs on the whirlpool. Obviously I've thought about it a lot. But first, I'll have to learn "coding". Don't say programming online. They'll tear you apart in the forums. It's like admitting you only know Visual Basic (wipes away tears - vicious little bastards).
Which brings me to the first installment of Gateway to the Future, learning Visual Basic for Applications, which is super easy to do if you have MS Excel, which I do, and you like it, which I do. Excel is the best thing Microsoft ever did. As a matter of fact it might be the only good thing Microsoft ever did. I'm thinking about it, but no sense in wasting too much time...
I've actually taken a few stabs at learning programming in the past, one a long time ago, in high school, in the computer lab, when a friend who was TA'ing in the computer lab and who I played this King Kong banana throwing game with (I was not taking computer lab, I was TA'ing across the hall, don't remember anything about it as I spent all my time in the computer lab or riding around with my friends) showed me how to call up a list of Basic commands from the DOS prompt. I remember the mindless enjoyment I had, typing at the prompt, watching the files and directories whiz by, and then typing DEBUG and something else and suddenly seeing a column of characters and gibberish, all hex numbers, and discovering that I was seeing a text file Character by Character, as it was actually written on the disk itself! I was amazed , but I was also thinking a lot about girls and dice and sci fi novels at the time, and we didn't have a home computer, and I will totally give up on something, at the drop of a hat, so I never learned more.
Later, during one of my many spans of unemployed time, I took a stab at learning Visual Basic.Net, which seems to have flickered in and out of existence in the time since then, and I don't really understand what it's for now and can't afford to re-learn and there's so much free stuff to learn that there's no point. I quite enjoyed that experience, to the point that I eventually made a picture viewer for my web page, where people could click through some of my drawings that I'd scanned. But eventually my unemployment ran out and I had to go back to work at various horrible temp jobs and had no time to return to it until now.
And I discovered that not only could you record macros in Excel, which I had used often and on some rare occasions even for actual work, but it would actually generate VBA code as you recorded and you could edit it! It was on a par with the time my wife showed me the board editor in Age of Mythology. I was amazed that Microsoft had included something fun in their office software - but of course, it was for Excel. I eventually got a for Dummies book on Excel programming, and midway through that book, I experienced my major insight on computers and my relationship to them: I hated and feared computers for the same reasons I hate and fear air travel; total loss of control. You are in the maddeningly indifferent hands of others, subject to their soul-sucking security checks; bag probes, password requirements, security questions, long lines, progress bars, enforced bare-footedness (an ancient Assyrian technique for humiliating prisoners), swirly word pictures that don't make a recognizable word!
The solution? For air travel, to find superman's fortress and steal his green crystal (if you dare run through the gigantic hologram of Marlon Brando, denouncing you in a voice like thunder! - it's just an alarm system, but superman is coming and he is very swift and fast) that is to say there is no solution but the proud highway, meaning road trip.
But for computers there is a solution, the green crystal is out there and you can steal it from them, we are aged but cunning and I still have a day job thank Christ. Many my age have no net, and face the grim prospect of mass competition with the other career refugees, learning to program in some language they will come to despise in "coding boot camps" with masses of other bewildered old timers, now rendered useless by the creepy millennials in Feel the Bern T-shirts, waving batons (crafted to look like light sabers) and herding us and our children to the vast tent cities accumulating just outside the inner city cosplay-grounds for twenty somethings where they work.
I will be avoiding the boot-camp type learning system for now, as I prefer to learn at my own pace (think glacier), but I'm not above jumping in if the financial opportunity presents, like an old people scholarship or a bequest.
Back to the VBA for Excel book, and my quest to learn to learn coding. Upon experiencing the epiphany, I made a goal that I would make a game written in VBA and configure it as an Add-in that anyone with a copy of Excel could install, but since then I resolved on another goal which has put the Excel game on the back burner: To rework the hagenart website with JavaScript. I resolved on this goal because I picked up some JavaScript from a free app, (which I will credit and discuss in time), and JavaScript is fun and maybe I take too readily to quick and easy and I'm tired of all the remarks on Stack overflow.
Also, with html and JavaScript I'll be able to put actual examples on this blog! Maybe, not sure of the support
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